Crystal Arts & Crafts in Nigeria

Berlinale mask mode. YouTube superheroes. Abbas Kiarostami close up "Crystal", a film directed by Daria Zhuk about a girl who really wanted to get out, is out tomorrow. Elena Smolina found in the film, nominated by Belarus for the Oscar, not only a believable portrait of the 90s, but also unequivocal hints that they have not gone anywhere. “Buy cheese, margarine, vegetables, and most importantly - potatoes,” Vele (Alina Nasibullina) mother repeats, like a spell. DJ Velya will not buy potatoes - the main Belarusian brand - instead of a grocery one, she will go to the embassy and apply for an American visa. The purpose of the trip is the special musical culture of the city of Chicago and also to get out of Minsk in 1996, where “nothing will ever change”. At the Belka-Strelka Party discos, where Velya, along with her protruding boyfriend, is putting on a house, monuments to the leaders and heroes of the war look down at the dancers: strong-willed chins, bayonets. Veli's mother tells about them excitedly on excursions to tourists and schoolchildren: “The task of t Crystal Arts & Crafts in Nigeria he Belarusian partisans was to create unbearable conditions ...” The war ended, unbearable conditions remained. But Minsk of the 90s, in which director Daria Zhuk puts the action of his film, is not the usual gray Eastern European city, on the contrary, it is a post-Soviet coloring: a piece of an empire that has fallen into dust, inhabited by the shadows of the past turned into a myth, colored with rare foreign treasures: imported gear, sparkling powder box, audio cassette. True, if Velya manages to live in Minsk, almost without touching the scoop, mainly with the help of music constantly playing in the headphones, ignore her mother's motto "You need to live in your homeland", "Belarus is my karma" and dream of the imaginary, invented by strangers stories and magazine clippings of Chicago, - then, due to confusion with a fake visa certificate in the provincial town of Khrustalny, she finds out what she is really leaving from. "Crystal", named after the town where salaries are given out in salad bowls and wine glasses, is orchestrated with a faint magic tinkle. This is how the pendants on the chandeliers, the glasses of clinkers, the decanters in the sideboards, and the absolutely meaningless and beautiful (in spite of or due to its meaninglessness) crystal swan ring. All that remained of Soviet prosperity was this ringing, gentle and Muratov's strange. Poverty, lack of prospects, the cult of the endless, never ending Great War, normalized violence, lack of respect for all for all, and at the same time - pure crystal ringing in the soundtrack, reflections and reflections in magic glasses - make the successor "Cloud Paradise" and "Little Faith "" Crystal "looks like a dream, not a pamphlet. Waiting for a call from the embassy (indicated a fictitious place of work at a crystal factory, wrote someone's phone number, a long story) Velya spends several days with her family preparing for the wedding, and quickly overcomes the path from good-heartedness to sobering. Soviet feminism (a woman drags work and a house on herself, a drunken husband does not shine), Soviet military (they humiliate you, you humiliate), Soviet business (jam fish, go to a factory with a roomy shopping bag): it is almost surprising that in the author's view there is no arrogance at all, but there is also no attempt to find a little primordial charm where there is nothing to look for. “There were rules, then the rules ended, and hello,” says the recently demobilized groom, for whom the rules are the laws of the zone, about the collapse of the imperial world. It is interesting to imagine where, in which office this groom ended up 22 years later, now. It so happened that the context in which the Crystal, nominated from Belarus for the Oscar, appears on the screens, takes the film from the territory of safe retro to the space of the actual: to the world where the war that ended seventy years ago is always going on, where they yearn for the rules, where more and more often it sounds "you need to live only in your homeland" and where the decorating streets, only similar to crystal ones, sparkle with snowflakes and flowers. From what they are now made, you no longer understand. Editor-in-chief of Cinema Art since summer 2017, Meduza columnist, author of books on cinema Russia, 119002, Moscow, st. Arbat, 35 (Central House of Actor), office. 553 Terms of use Design and development - Charmer Registration n https://jiji.ng/art-collectibles/crystal