Brief Encounters

Following three feature films produced with former husband Oleksandr Muratov, Kira Muratova introduced Brief Encounters as her first solo-directed film. Conveyed through a series of flashbacks, the film narrative unfolds around two women whose lives become unexpectedly entangled. Muratova proceeds to evolve a story around a love triangle concerning Valentina, a city council bureaucrat (played by Muratova herself); Maxim, her geologist partner (played by the legendary Soviet protest singer Vladimir Vysotsky); and Nadia (Nina Ruslanova), a young woman working as a waitress in a roadside cafe. Digressing from the socialist realist conventions, Brief Encounters unfolds as meditation around desire and longing and is largely centered around the core relationship between two women—a lover and a partner. One of several groundbreaking Soviet films made in 1966–67 at the close of the Khrushchev “thaw,” the film faced the wrath of censors who suppressed it for two decades. It’s precisely through formal experiments that Muratova, as a director, conveyed social realities and an uninhibited political consciousness. A Janus Films release.

Restored in 4K by STUDIOCANAL in collaboration with the Criterion Collection at L’Immagine Ritrovata/Éclair Classics.

Preceded by:

The Doctor
Volodymyr Bortko, 1973, Ukrainian SSR, 25m

Produced by graduate students from the Kyiv Film Institute and rediscovered in its archives in 2012, The Doctor features Kira Muratova—who at the time had been suspended from directing at the Odesa Film Studio—on screen in a minor yet engaging role as a desperate woman pleading with the titular oncologist to help her terminally ill husband. Because they were not intended for public distribution, student films of this period bypassed a rigorous censorship system and could be more experimental and daring.