Little Vera

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Movie
German title Little Vera
Original title Маленькая Вера
Country of production USSR
original language Russian
Publishing year 1988
length 128 minutes
Age rating FSK 16
Rod
Director Vasily Pitschul
script Maria Chmelik
production Gorky Film Studios
music Vladimir Matezki
camera Yefim Resnikov
cut Elena Zabolotskaya
occupation

Little Vera , also Little Vera (original title: Маленькая Вера , Malenkaja Wera), is a Soviet feature film directed by Vasily Pitschul from 1988 .

action

Vera lives with her parents in an industrial and port city in a block of flats under very cramped conditions. Her father Nikolai works as a driver. The mother Rita takes care of the alcoholic devotedly and works herself to death. Both cannot cope with Vera's upbringing and blame Vera's friend Lenka for it. When the mother finds a 20 dollar banknote in her daughter's belongings and Vera does not want to explain where she got it from, she calls her son Viktor, who works as a doctor in Moscow. She asks him to come home. He should have a positive influence on his sister, who has finished school and should actually look for a place at university.

In the afternoon, Vera goes with Lenka to the meeting point in town, where the youngsters hang around, dance and fight, which is why the police are always present. Here she gets to know the blond curly Sergei, with whom she goes to bed in his dormitory that same evening. Back at home, Vera first has to take care of her drunken father, take away the alcohol and give him something to eat. From him she learns that her brother Viktor will come, but as always without his family, which surprises the father a little. Three days later Viktor arrives and gives a lecture in the apartment about the hierarchy in the family and who has something to say there and when. When Vera has enough, she simply goes to Sergej in the dormitory. Here she is found by her brother who wants to visit his friend Sergei. When he sees how the two of them stand together, he gives Vera a lecture, whereupon Sergei tells him that he wants to marry Vera and be loyal.

Back at her parents' home, Viktor has already told everything and so she gets a row. So she creates a fait accompli, claims that she is pregnant, and houses Sergei as her future husband in her parents' apartment. The drama takes its course when Sergej defies the family rules. Vera, torn between two worlds, fears for her love for Sergei. This includes Nikolai at his birthday party in the toilet, because he is completely drunk and is constantly looking for an argument. Vera releases her father after a certain time, but he stabs Sergej at the first opportunity with a kitchen knife, who is seriously injured. But he does not reveal that his father-in-law stabbed him, but claims that he can no longer remember. Vera and her mother are not telling the truth either, because they cannot do without the breadwinner of the family.

Vera can no longer cope with all the problems and wants to kill herself with schnapps and tablets. But she is found by her brother, who is just entering the apartment with Sergei, who has escaped from the hospital. With his help, she vomits up the tablets she just swallowed in the toilet. Now Viktor is going back to Moscow and Sergej is reconciled with Vera because he loves her. Nobody realizes that during this time Vera's father dies of heart failure in the kitchen.

production

The film, shot in color, premiered in October 1988 under the title Маленькая Вера in the Soviet Union, where it had over 54 million viewers.

The shooting location was Zhdanov in the Ukrainian SSR (now Mariupol, Ukraine ) on the Azov Sea .

In the Federal Republic of Germany , the first performance took place on February 11, 1989 during the 39th Berlin International Film Festival in the series organized for the 19th time: International Forum of Young Films (in short: Forum). On March 1, 1990, the regular launch began in the cinemas. On March 21, 1990 the film was broadcast on TV channel 1 PLUS .

In the GDR , the premiere took place on May 4, 1990 in the Berlin cinema Toni .

criticism

For Helmut Ullrich von der Neue Zeit , the film shows:

“... the precise observation of hard and difficult life in poverty and shabbiness. The struggle for life as something grueling, which has demoralizing effects, which creates indifference and unfriendliness and also rawness. The attitude towards life of a youth who is living unhappily into the day, already marked by these depressing conditions, disillusioned. Stagnation translated into the psychic. Monotony and lack as the basic elements of the emotional climate. "

The lexicon of international film described the film as an impressive, extremely densely staged debut feature film, which describes the conflicts of a youth who have lost fixed orientations in a naturalistic depiction that was unusual for Soviet standards.

Awards

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Neues Deutschland, March 17th, p. 15
  2. ↑ Neue Zeit of May 4, 1990, p. 12
  3. ↑ Neue Zeit of May 9, 1990, p. 9
  4. ↑ Little Vera. In: Lexicon of International Films . Film service , accessed October 28, 2017 .Template: LdiF / Maintenance / Access used 
  5. ↑ Neues Deutschland from July 1, 1989, p. 9
  6. ↑ Neues Deutschland, November 27, 1989, p. 4