THE TWO FEDORS

“Come home”, says the young woman to her husband and child at film’s end. This is perhaps the first moment where we understand along with big Fedor (a soldier returned from the war) and little Fedor what this even means – to have a home, or to make one. Two strangers sharing a name, who, brought together by chance in a railway carriage, become father and son, periodically switching roles. Elective affinities of another nature, cautious attempts to care for the other – in a time of fatherlessness and homelessness, both transcendental and real. Khutsiev’s first solo directorial stroke of genius is a seismographic reading of the early post-war years. Life between trauma and reawakening.