Former animator Andrey Khrzhanovsky combines scripted scenes, archival footage, animation, and surrealist flights of fancy to create this stirring portrait of Nobel Prize-winning poet Joseph Brodsky and the postwar Soviet cultural scene. Exiled from his native Russia in 1972, Brodsky once claimed that if he were ever to return to the Motherland, he would do so anonymously. Stepping off from that premise, Khrzhanovsky has created an ironic fairy tale. The journey covers not only geography but time as well, as the audience is transported back to the Russia of the Fifties and Sixties to the artistic explosion that erupted in the wake of de-Stalinization and the Thaw. Room and a Half is both a moving tribute to one of the 20th century’s major poets, as well as a fascinating look at cultural life under the watchful eyes of an authoritarian regime.

New York Film Festival Programme

This screening is supported by Langtons Hotel in Kilkenny.