PAPER SOLDIER

The Soviet Union in the early 1960s. Preparations for the first manned space flight are underway in the Kazakh steppe, a wilderness strewn with penal colonies left over from Stalin’s time. The Georgian physician Daniel Pokrowsky has been appointed to look after the cosmonauts-to-be. Daniel is having a good run both privately and professionally: he has a PhD under his belt, and is enjoying the company of a mistress in Kazakhstan while his pretty wife awaits his return in Moscow. But the external trappings of success leave him relatively cold: what counts in his eyes is the success of the space project. He hopes the pioneering achievement will usher in a new era in which the Soviet Union can leave behind the shadow of the Stalinist past, the era which also claimed his parents as victims. But when one of the prospective cosmonauts dies in a training accident, Daniel begins to doubt the entire venture, plagued by guilt about sending another young man to potential death. With PAPER SOLDIER, which was awarded the Silver Lion and the prize for best cinematography at Venice in 2008, Alexey German Jr. surveys in powerfully poetic images the errors and hopes of an entire era.