Film Screening: Svadba (“The Wedding”)

Please join us for a screening of The Wedding (2000), directed by Pavel Lungin! In a small mining village near Moscow the wedding of Michka and Tania is being prepared. Tania, Michka’s child love, is back from Moscow. In the family of Michka, this wedding does not delight anybody. The father, hero of the village, sees all the guests he’ll have to feed. The grandfather sees, him,with an evil eye “this creature” entering the family and the mother cries for the fate of her son. But the wedding starts, without money, maybe without bride… A true spectacle where all is possible, whereas worst or best, where the limits vanish, where the drama is as close as happiness. Pavel Lungin: This project was born from questions which torment me and for which I have no answers. How does the Russian people survive in year 2000 ? I do not speak about great misfortunes : war, the Maffia or the corruption, but about the everyday life. What became the family, love, childhood, friendship ? Did people change ? Can they change ? I’ve desired to paint through situations sometimes funny, sometimes tragic, the collective portrait of a mining provincial town, that of Lipki, a small borough 200 kilometers from Moscow. There, the time seems to be stopped : socialism era is over and the new life hasn’t started yet. The main actors are surrounded by the inhabitants of Lipki, images of these people forgotten by their government, the artists and the whole world. These million Russians lost in the middle of their country. The main character of film, Michka, is ingenuous, “idiotic” in the sense of Dostoïevski, someone for whom sacrifice is as natural as breathing. In Russia, a proverb says : “Without a right man, a village cannot exist.” This is the key sentence of this film, because as long as in Russia the force and the kindness of people like Michka will remain, this country will always have forces. Introduced by Yuri Corrigan, Assistant Professor of Russian & Comparative Literature.