THE GIFT TO STALIN

A film of remembrance.
A train carrying human cargo laboriously makes its way through a wide-open landscape, the conditions suffered by the deportees to Central Asia becoming increasingly horrific. During one stop, the little Jewish boy Sashka is rescued from certain death by an elderly Kazakh, who takes him back to his village. Kasym soon becomes a kind of substitute grandfather to the child, who also rouses the protective instincts of the rest of the villagers: Verka, Ezhik, Faty and whatever they’re called. Sashka is now part of the world again, and it’s a colourful and many-sided one at that. Unaware that his parents are long dead, Sashka believes he’ll see them again soon if he comes up with a strikingly original gift for the seventieth birthday of Stalin (it is 1949). And the Soviet regime is busy dreaming up its own gift to Stalin: an atomic explosion, very close to the tiny village… Years later, now an old man himself, Sashka returns to Kazakhstan, visits the graves, the hills, all the places that hold memories for him – keeping the promise he once made to old Kasym. And he remembers. THE GIFT TO STALIN is above all a film of open countryside: both of the wild Kazakh expanses and of the furrowed and lined faces that, like Kasym’s, look like landscapes themselves. The face, Dryer once said, is a landscape one never tires of exploring. And this film is particularly impressive confirmation of his words.