Review of Little Vera (1988) by Meesh K — 10 Apr 2017

It's alarming, to say the least, how little the English speaking world knows about Russia's past. You can't really call it a Russian film. Ironically, this movie was filmed in Zhdanov(Mariupol), which is now a part of Ukriane. The director chose this city because that's where he was from and he wanted to show the reality of where he came from. This city always been a ghetto. Now it's even worse, since this part of Ukraine is engulfed in a civil war. So the hopeless openededness of this film was right on point.

During this period there was a plethora of similar films in the Soviet Union, but for some weird reason only this one was known outside of the country. There were films with worse sex scenes before and after this one, and unlike many other countries, there was no censorship, so TV was full of nudity at the time.

This era of Soviet film was called "Chernuha" which translates as darkness, despair. It was full of realism, had this arthouse vibe, had very genuine acting, and always had a somewhat hidden psychological or philosophical dilemma in it. Sounds like Oscar's winner Moonlight, haha. Indeed, if Moonlight took place in the 80's Soviet Union and instead of drugs people were drinking, it would fit right in. Some scenes are almost identical. (i.e. filming a pot on a stove for a good 1 minute or so or a character is staring at something or thinking for a long time.) I actually seen a lot of them when I was a kid, but it took me decades to watch most of them again. Many never been preserved and therefore are in a very bad shape and some I still can't find, so they were pretty much lost during the switch to the digital format... During the 90's, Russian society rejected everything from the Soviet era. Even this film would have probably been lost if it wasn't for unusual international interest in it because of some naive sex scene.