OLIARA

Hungarian István Magyar, one of many who volunteered to serve in the USSR in the 1930s, believes in the idea of world revolution. He knows that it can’t be made in white gloves — Lenin said so. He gets into a task force of the OGPU secret service, which is engaged in the confiscation of livestock from nomads living in the steppe. The scenes he observes on the winter steppes shake him to the core. The brutality, the bloodshed, the fight of brother against brother — is this how a brave new world is built? Or is it all about the fact, as a local Bolshevik convinces him, that this is «wild Asia» and not «civilized Europe»? Director Tamás Tóth follows the precepts of the western genre – in OLIARA, there is a frontier, a goal that must be reached in order to survive, a turbulent new order that threatens to destroy the old way of life, and an outsider character who is completely immersed in a culture that is very different from his own. But behind the strong genre structure, archetypal heroes and anti-heroes and epic landscape shots looms the real tragedy of Asharshylyk, a mass famine caused by forced Soviet collectivization.

Text: Ksenia Reutova

08.11.2024 | 22:00 | Stadthalle (original version with english subtitles + simultaneous translation into German)

10.11.2024 | 10:00 | Glad-House (original version with english subtitles + simultaneous translation into German)