RFW 2019: Great Poetry

Great Poetry is about two men who live on the outskirts of Moscow and work as cash collectors. They are young and all they have in the world is each other. They spend their lives moving money for other people and gaming on cockfights at a dorm of migrant workers. While daydreaming of high ideals they enroll into a poetry class. Attempts to find poetry in the prosaic world lead the both men to the conclusion that the only poetic move they can make is to rob a bank.

Paul Claudel wrote that a person lives their life intimately and poetically, and there is a lot of poetry in the film. However, it is not about words or rhymes. It is about friendship and betrayal in our vicious and alien world in which anyone who tries to be honest and consistent ends up looking naive and cruel. It’s about the ever-present and incomprehensible force that, no matter what, makes our life so frantic, strange and lonely.

Genre: Drama

Director: Alexander Lungin

Cast: Alexander Kuznetsov, Aleksey Filimonov, Fyodor Lavrov, Evgeniy Sytyy, Elena Makhova

Russia, 2019

In Russian with English subtitles.

Q&A session with director Alexander Lunging, actor Alexander Kuznetsov