georgekaplan2

This is a serious documentary that features many interviews and behind-the-door conversations, but seriously suffers from false equivalency and does little to illuminate the societal dynamics. The title "Two Catalonias" is a major unimaginative cop out. All we get is political points uttered from both "sides", without never getting any idea what the Catalan population is actually thinking. I came out more confused than enlightened. The filmmakers refuse to give the ethnic dimension in the struggle any attention or legitimacy: it's all about economics and political populism (whether in Barcelona or Madrid) with the public depicted as agent-less masses just going along with whoever manages to rouse them or push them. I simply can't buy it. It would have helped the viewers if the filmmakers had somehow indicated who speaks Spanish and who Catalan; are there some distinction between Castilian- and Catalan-speakers? What role does Spanish chauvinism play in the process and Catalan history under dictatorship? I understand that the Catalan pro-independence politicians try to promote themselves as tolerant progressive Europeans and pose themselves against the more backward Castilian chauvinism, but the filmmakers could have penetrated these public images and analyzed the societal dynamics more deeply. The few foreign reporters commenting on the affairs don't add anything illuminating and just offer the regular boring "balanced" analysis. I'm sure the filmmakers could have found more interesting observers. Though the film has some interesting features, in the end, it offers too little information for the viewer to decide which "side" of the story is more convincing and what are ordinary Catalans actually thinking.

A fascinating Estonian angle on Nordic noir, "The Ghost Mountaineer" is an excellent and original autobiographical thriller by Estonian documentary filmmaker Urmas Eero Liiv, a one-time biologist and a mountaineer. It tells the story of a group of late-Soviet Estonian university students embarking on a long hike in the snowy mountains and valleys of Buryat mountains in Siberia in search for the rare nephrite-rocks and, of course, fun. On the way, they lose one of their own and are forced to struggle with the harsh Siberian climate, their own inner-demons, perverse provincial Soviet bureaucrats, and the seemingly mysterious Buryat natives, semi-tamed by the European "civilization" of the Soviet/Russian type.

The imdb plot description and the previous reviewers seriously misrepresent this film. This is neither a youth film, nor an adventure movie. This is no horror flick or an orientalizing supernatural fantasy. It is a realistic thriller about youngsters from the European part of the USSR encountering the far-away Soviet East and its provinical colonial Russian bureaucrats. Kalatozov's "Letter Never Sent" meets with Peter Weir meets with the best of contemporary Nordic thrillers. Though the depiction of Buryats and Russian bureaucrats could have been subtler, it honestly represents the ethnic projections, stereotypes, and relationships in the USSR on the eve of its collapse, without any retroactive political correctness so typical to the morally monistic cinema today. The film's dream sequences not only shock, but also offer an interesting glimpse at how the Estonian youngsters project their culturally conditioned fears on the strange environment, and the film makes it pretty clear that this point of view has little to do with the much more complex social reality existing in the Buryat village at the time (the film was shot on location in the same Buryat village, where the actual events took place).

This is a very fine snowy thriller and an excellent debut for Urmas E. Liiv. I hope he will return to feature filmmaking very soon.

This is an excellent Latvian Soviet social drama by Latvian screen-legend Leonisds Leimanis set in the Great Depression-era Riga. Though a thoroughly Communist film (the historical context of the film seems to have gone totally unnoticed for the previous reviewer) in a semi-dated realist style, the film's skillful execution and good actors make it a highly enjoyable humanist, though still anti- democratic, tragicomedy.

The scenario of the film stands out from your standard Socialist Realist text for the fact that the novel on which it is based was penned by Latvian writer Andrejs Upīts in 1937, three years before the Sovietization of independent Latvia. This was the time when Latvian leftists, like their contemporaries in the West, were writing imaginative social novels that became the fore-bearers of postwar Neo-Realism, something quite different from the Soviet boilerplate odes on Stalin and the kolkhozes. The film is also an interesting historical document on the ways the interwar democratic republic was allowed and encouraged to be represented in the late 1960s USSR. The film mocks multiparty state and the parliamentary system, makes all Latvian students look fascist and Latvian police their tool - a horrible pseudo-historical disinformation. The party's are rarely mentioned by name, only identified by numbers to delegitimize them and their promises and probably in order not to remind the audience the benefits of pluralistic representative democracy. Clearly, there is one unmentioned party the people should be voting for.. Ironically, at the time of its setting and the writing of the novel, the USSR was the most violent state on earth, starving to death 6 million Ukrainian peasants, deporting hundreds of thousands of "kulaks", and beginning its carnival of show trials and deadly purges against the "enemies of the people" from high party bosses and military leaders to urban prostitutes and vagrants.

The film seems semi-dated, because it reminds one films of the era of its base-novel. A comparison with Ford's Grapes of Wrath could be in order. Yet, the film has also elements of both Neo-Realism and New Wave and it ends with a shot straight out of Truffaut. This is a highly recommended Soviet Latvian drama film, not only for its crafty execution, but also for what it reveals about Communist propaganda and its critique of an open society at the dawn of stagnation.