Buben, baraban AKA Tambourine, Drum (2009) by Aleksey Mizgiryov

Quote:
Yekaterina Artemovna (Natalia Negoda), forty-five, has a hard life. She lives in a small mining town where she works as a librarian and, like her only friend and colleague, rents a little room in a project. She has difficulties making ends meet on her meagre salary, which is often paid late, and sells off some of the library’s books illegally in a nearby station. One day, a man with a strong sense of civic duty, wearing a naval uniform, returns one of these books to the library, apparently without recognising it was Yekaterina who had actually sold him the book. She falls in love with this newcomer and, when he moves in with her, the monotony of her daily life seems over. When her father hands on an apartment to her, it seems the fates are smiling at her, and a permanent smile now seems to hover on her lips. But this happiness is suddenly brought to an end when her lover discovers her illicit trade in books and leaves her for her friend. Yekaterina can bear it no longer and decides to take vengeance… In late 1990s Russia, suffering from the difficult transition from planned to market economy, each individual struggles as best he can to improve his own life. Yekaterina’s father, although seriously ill, continues to work at the mine until it kills him; the police yield to corruption, and Yekaterina’s lover proves to be less wholesome than he appears. Through his protagonist’s fate, director Alexei Mizgirev gives a remarkable depiction of the limits of human endurance in the face of despair. The settings of Buben.Baraban underscore this emotional and material distress in which the film’s characters seem locked: winter is harsh, the landscape is grey, and life is, literally, bloody. Buben. Baraban is a dramatic portrayal of a Russia in search of a more clement future. — Locarno Film Festival