Kommisar
(Komissar, Aleksandr Askoldov, USSR 1967, 108 min., 35mm, Russian w/subtitles)
Museum Treasures. Made in 1967 during the Soviet New Wave, The Commissar went unseen for more than twenty years after the KGB seized the film and banned it from showing. The film follows a female commissar of the Red Army during the Russian Civil War (1918–1922), who is sent to live with a Jewish family in the Ukrainian countryside when she becomes pregnant. The Commissar is a sensitive and elegiac portrait of a mostly vanished culture, the customs and rituals of the Soviet Jewish daily life being a primary focus. The director, Aleksandr Askoldov, never made another film; the authorities objected to the implications of Soviet complicity in the eventual fate of Russian Jewry. The film was not released until 1988, and has never been shown at the Dryden Theatre.
Special presentation by Kelsey Eckert, Project Archivist, Moving Image Department.