Close Up

26 October 2019: Eternal Homecoming

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Eternal Homecoming
Kira Muratova, 2012, 114 min
Russian with English subtitles

"On screen, images of a casting with various actors. The viewer doesn’t immediately realize this. Towards the finale, Muratova employs a trick. The black-and-white images are broken off and the film continues in colour. In the screening room, the producer and a potential investor, a sugar magnate, discuss the material of the uncompleted film. The director has died and there is no money to finish the movie. Muratova asked big stars of Russian cinema and stage as well as amateurs who played in her previous films to collaborate on this movie. In her filming of a casting, she once again uses her cherished device of refrains: the repetition of the same scene over and over, with the same replies in the same interior, with a number of actors playing the same part, acquiring non-trivial significance, becoming ironic and philosophical. Muratova is fascinated by the multi-sidedness of one-sidedness and vice versa. And by possibilities of aesthetic transformations between the world of the past and the one we perceive now." – IFFR


Part of our season on Kira Muratova