Letters from a dead person

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Movie
German title Letters from a dead person
Original title Письма мёртвого человека
Country of production Soviet Union
original language Russian
Publishing year 1986
length 87 minutes
Age rating FSK 16
Rod
Director Konstantin Lopuschanski
script Konstantin Lopuschansky
Vyacheslav Rybakov
Boris Strugazki
music Alexander Schurbin
camera Nikolai Pokopzew
cut T. Pulinoi
occupation

Letters of a Dead (OT: Russian Письма мёртвого человека , transcribed Pisma myortvogo cheloveka ) is a Soviet film drama by director Konstantin Lopuschanski from 1986. The film opened in the Federal Republic of Germany on April 23, 1987, in the GDR it was called Letters from a dead man on October 30, 1987.

action

After a nuclear war , the people of a city live in bunkers. When they go out into the outside world, they are only protected with gas masks and protective suits, and only to get food and medicine. There are many of these shelters. But gradually they are shut down by the government. The healthy inmates are taken to a central collection point, which is then to be sealed for 50 years.

An older professor appears as the main character (no name is given). As a Nobel Prize winner, he was involved in a number of important research projects, which makes him partly to blame for the catastrophe. He lives with some other people in a museum bunker. To generate electricity, a dynamo has to be started by pedaling; the world literature surrounding it provides heat by burning it. The professor writes letters to his missing and probably dead son Erik, asking hypothetical questions about the future of people and whether the nuclear war was global or only limited. Meanwhile the bunker occupants are getting fewer and fewer. They gradually die from radiation sickness . The scientist's wife dies first.

At his wife's grave, the professor later remembers that the nuclear inferno started in his hometown, triggered by a computer error. The officer on duty tried to revoke the launch of the rockets, but choked on the coffee, so the order was given seven seconds too late. (The images of the nuclear detonations are underlaid with the singing of an opera singer and the babbling of a toddler.)

A clergyman and several children live in a bunker near the museum. The children are silent and are therefore not brought to the central office. When the father dies, the professor takes care of the children. He teaches them humanity and a sense of community and celebrates Christmas Eve with them. One of the children, as you will learn at the end, writes down everything the professor teaches them.

In the final scenes, one of the children tells that the professor died on the night of Christmas Eve. Shortly before his death, the children asked him the crucial question about the end of the world. The professor told them that this was not the end of the world and told them to leave. "Because as long as people are on the move, there has always been hope." The children set off on a journey into the unknown.

photography

The film was shot neither in black and white nor in color, but in three different, monochrome duplex tones, some of which are reminiscent of bromine (see Stalker ) or sepia photographs: all the scenes in the makeshift bunkers with sick, contaminated (wife) or disabled (silent children) people play, show a yellowish-brown tone. Scenes in the state-controlled bunkers and underground hospitals are painted in a cold shade of blue. Exterior shots of the destroyed city show a yellow-brown tone with a clear red cast.

Reviews

"Moving charges against mass extermination [...] with the help of oppressive, symbolically charged images of tremendous power," said the lexicon of international films . The film is "serious, clear and consistent" and raises "important moral questions of our time". Stefan Höltgen from F.LM - Texts on the Film described the film as “a haunting reminder for reason, both in protest against the irrational nuclear war, and in the resolute emphasis on human humanity, which ultimately represents a final anchor of hope ".

In Germany, Letters of a Dead person was named “Film of the Month” in June 1987 by the Protestant Film Work jury .

Awards

In 1986 Konstantin Lopuschanski was honored with the "Grand Prize" at the Mannheim-Heidelberg International Film Festival . The film received the rating "Particularly valuable" from the Wiesbaden film evaluation office .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Letters from a dead man. In: Lexicon of International Films . Film service , accessed July 1, 2017 .Template: LdiF / Maintenance / Access used 
  2. ↑ See f-lm.de