Outskirts

Director: Boris Barnet

1933 / 98min / DCP

“In the pictorial structure of Okraina [Outskirts] there is something of Chekhov’s plays,” wrote influential Soviet film historian Nikolai Lebedev, citing Barnet’s unpredictable musical interweave of comic and tragicomic tones, and his layered command of ensemble performance, in this singular poetic masterpiece—a digressive, multi-character chronicle of a restive border town rocked by labor strife, the outbreak of World War I, and ultimately the coming October Revolution. Featuring Barnet’s then-wife Yelena Kuzmina as Manka, the daughter of a local cobbler who falls in love with a happy-go-lucky German POW, the film advances a vision of internationalist solidarity that the Nazi rise that same year would soon render unimaginable.

Introduction by Metrograph Programmer Edo Choi and The Theater of the Matters on Saturday, March 21st

Part of Boris Barnet A Soviet Poet