TO LIVE!

What happens when an individual intervenes in a situation? When you’re somewhere in the middle of nowhere and you see that someone is going to be killed? Of course you try to prevent it. Then suddenly it looks like it might be your turn to die too. And it may just happen too that you absolutely can’t stand the person you just saved, or at least you’ve got issues with their views. Yuri Bykov, whose contributions to Russian cinema parallel Wojciech Smarzowski’s achievements in Poland, paints an abysmal portrait of his homeland in his works for screens big and small: a social cosmos in which the representatives of law and order can’t be trusted because they take the law into their own hands all too often. There is no more salvation in this universe, though perhaps there is still a glimmer of hope.