Strange, shocking, and profoundly affecting, this 1989 masterpiece begins as a black-and-white melodrama about a newly widowed woman and becomes the story of a narcoleptic schoolteacher, a blackly comic portrayal of late Soviet society, and an avant-garde indictment of humanity (including Muratova’s audience). The Asthenic Syndrome remains a relevant and fascinating meditation on grief, cruelty, and the
relationship between art and life.
Introduction by Matthew McWilliams,
Slavic Languages and Literatures, Yale University
We are proud to present this tribute to Russian-Ukrainian director Kira Muratova(1934-2018), one of the most wildly inventive, acerbic, and unsentimentally humane filmmakers in cinema history. This series, the first US retrospective since Muratova’s death in June, offers a selection of her very hard-to-see films on DCP with English subtitles, provided by the Dovzhenko Center in Kiev.