UNDER ELECTRIC CLOUDS

Russia in the year 2017: It’s foggy, snow covers the ground. People walk around in the twilight, on poorly paved roads, between ruins or on derelict land, which is adorned with a broken statue of Lenin among other things. The people are dressed wrong, visibly freezing and can’t or don’t seem to want to understand one other, since they are speaking “foreign languages”. It is the stories of these normal, “superfluous” people that Alexey German Jr. would like to tell with the film’s loosely-connected episodes: Kirgiz construction workers, melancholy children of the ruling class, artists, architects gone mad, junkies, tour guides. And in the middle of it all again and again the silhouetted shell of an unfinished skyscraper – the owner has died recently, his heirs are at odds, the architect with the wine-stain birthmark on his face is undecided whether he should have a spire or a dome put on top. German’s cinematic tableau capturing the psychological state of his country stands squarely in the tradition of great Russian art cinema. For its meditative, elegiac images, UNDER ELECTRIC CLOUDS was awarded the Silver Bear for Best Camera at this year’s Berlinale.