Event Date
“A Debut? A Masterpiece? The new Tarkovsky?” Ways of Reading The Return (2003) by Andrei Zvyagintsev
About this event
In the 1990s, the Russian film industry hit rock bottom. In 2003, an unknown actor with some experience in making TV films came along with a debut film, The Return, which would go on to win the Golden Lion and Best Debut award at the prestigious Venice film festival. Critics hailed Andrei Zvyagintsev as the new Tarkovsky. In this talk, I explore the story behind the film and its extraordinary journey. I look at the film’s complex structure to find out what makes it a “masterpiece”. And I place The Return in the context of Zvyagintsev’s oeuvre, of Russian and international film history.
Birgit Beumers is professor emeritus in Film Studies, Aberystwyth University (UK); she has taught at Cambridge and Bristol universities, and currently at Passau University (Germany). She specializes in Russian culture, cinema and theatre, and the cinemas of the former Soviet territories, especially Central Asia. She is the author of A History of Russian Cinema (2009) and editor of the journals KinoKultura and Studies in Russian and Soviet Cinema.