The Barracks

Synopsis

Summer 1953 in Satka, a small town to the south of the Urals, somewhere between war-ravaged Russia and the gulags of Siberia. Olga, 23, sole survivor of a family wiped out in the siege of Leningrad, is the latest arrival in a comrnunal ex-barracks where she knows nobody. There is Alexei, the militiaman, who lives with his son Burka and girlfriend Claudia. Jora, a Jew and former victim of Stalin's purges and eccentric photographer-clown with a wooden leg. Friedrich, a former German soldier, married to a Russian; Guerka, a drunken dove breeder and former Nazi collaborator: and Polina, an overblown Ukrainian and her mute companion, Karim the Tatar.

Olga gradually settles into the life of this little community, with its joys and sorrows, romantic intrigues and a multitude of incidents, each trying to bury their oppressive past and live with relative insouciance. Jora for example is involved with a blonde widow, mother of two, who becomes his mistress and model; without her knowledge, he sells nude photos of her, and also organizes a major network to srnuggle vodka„ distilled by the couple next door. Olga attends her first ball, organizes a little party in honour of Polina , and gradually cedes to handsome Alexei's gentle but persistent courtship. Individual destinies, moments of intimacy and scenes of communal life succeed one another. Culminating in a final featuring three marriages, a birth and a funeral. Through a myriad of tiny details interspersed with dream sequences, Valerij Ogorodnikov portrays a gallery of tender-hearted, serious and crazy characters, affected by history while somehow living outside it and who now see themselves more as "people from barracks" than Russians of Germans. Adapted from a short story by Victor Petrov "Barak" — a film "dedicated to our parents" — is a tragi-comic portrait of the world of every-day provincial life in rural Russia just after the death of Stalin.

Biography

Born in 1951 in the Urals, Valerij Ogorodnikov trained as a chemical engineer and then studied film at VGIK in Moscow. He made his directorial debut in 1986 with THE BURGLAR, a realistic and disillusioned portrait of Soviet youth in the punk rock era which immediately attracted critical attention (FIPRESCI Prize at Venice the following year). In 1989 he made PROSHVINS'S PAPER EYES, a complex thriller in which a journalist investigates the long past mysterious death of a high level executive in the early days of Soviet television. OPUS BREDA LUBOVNOGO OCHAROVANIA (1991) charted the tragic love story between two patients in a psychiatric asylum. After a long spell in Germany - where he played the leading role in S.Solomun's WELTMEISTER" (1993) - Ogorodnikov returned to directing with BARRACK (1999), his fourth feature film.