Directed by Yuri Illienko | 96 mins | 1990
Released as the formal dissolution of the Soviet Union loomed, this adaptation of stories Sergei Parajanov wrote during his incarceration in the 1970s depicts the increasingly desperate attempts of a prisoner (Viktor Solovyov) to escape his own confinement. Filmed in the very prison where Parajanov—who, at the time of production, was dying of cancer—had been held, Yuri Illienko’s bracingly tactile work is both a tender goodbye to his onetime collaborator and a wary welcome to an uncertain future.