ROOM AND A HALF

Memories, memories: the Nobel Prize-winning author Joseph Brodsky (1940–1996) looks back upon his life. At his childhood and adolescence in Russia, his parents and his first girlfriends, his eventual deportation from the Soviet Union in 1972. An uncommonly colourful and diverse kaleidoscope of pictures and impressions emerges in the process, solemn and amusing in equal parts, penetrating and intensive. Brodsky’s autobiographical essays inspired his portrait by Andrey Khrzhanovsky, who deploys virtually the full gamut of filmic means, alternating acted scenes with documentary footage and archive photographs, colour with black-and-white or even sepia-tinged tones, and including animated sequences of all varieties.