The Province of Lost Film
DIRECTED & PRODUCED BY:
T. Lahusen, T. McDonald, A. Gershtein, A. Nikitin
CAMERA:
A. Gershtein
46 minutes; color; Russian with English subtitles; digital video; Canada, September 2008 (first cut: 2005).
LOCATION:
A tribute to the power of Soviet and Russian cinema. “Cinema Paradiso Soviet style,” The Province of Lost Film is about the magic and nostalgia of watching film collectively: in a movie house; a workers’ club; or at night, on an improvised screen hung in the village square. Employees of the former distribution and exhibition network, projectionists, and viewers from central Russia reflect upon the unique and already bygone experience of the Soviet experiment of ”cinefication,” which sought to bring the screen to every corner of the Soviet Union. Thus, the film captures one of the lost opportunities of the socialist dream. From the collective-farm classic of the Stalin era Cossacks of the Kuban to the hugely popular Indian film of 1955 The Vagabond, or the 1961 Soviet technicolor extravaganza, The Amphibious Man, and archival footage of the process of cinefication itself, the film reminds us of the immortal power of cinema and its place in the mind and heart of the individual.
The film at the World Culture Documentary Film Festival,
Potsdam, Germany, 2006 : Memories by its director, Joachim Polzer, twenty years later.
SCREENINGS & AWARDS
Okraina Festival, Ryazan, Russia, 2005; Globians World Culture Documentary Film Festival, Potsdam, Germany, 2006; 26th Atlantic Film Festival, Halifax, Canada, 2006; Documentary Film Festival “Rossiia,” Ekaterinburg, Russia; 2006; Barrie Film Festival & Mc Laren Art Centre, Barrie, Canada, 2007; 2d Issyk-Kul International Film Festival of the Shanghai Organization of Cooperation, Kyrgyzstan, 2008 (2d cut), Prize for best directing; 3d Zerkalo International Film Festival, Ivanovo, Russia, May 2009; Berdyansk International Film Festival, Ukraine, 2009; VIII Okraina Film Festival, Riazan, Russia, 2010.
![]() | ![]() | ![]() |
|---|---|---|
![]() | ![]() |





