Film festivals are one invaluable eye into world cinema, especially in the States, where home-grown films totally dominate the screen and Americans are squeamish about subtitles, feeling that if filmmakers really wanted us to see their products, they would make them in English like any normal, patriotic person would do. I saw The Gift to Stalin at the Boston Jewish Film Festival.
It’s 1949 and Stalin is giving free train rides to those minority populations he feels like exiling to Central Asia. When a clutch of dead bodies from a train car stuffed with Jews is unloaded at a tiny village in Kazakhstan for mass burial, the exiles slip a live orphaned Jewish child among them in the hopes that he will find freedom.
The two railroad men charged with grave digging for the authorities decide to save the lad. A one-eyed Kazakh elder named Kasym (brilliantly played by Nurzhuman Ikhtymbayev) takes Sashka (Dalen Shintemirov) home and shares with him the only riches he has to offer: his strong and massive body and heart.
Despite the heartbreak of poverty, of vulnerability to and violation by corrupt drunken officials, of lack of options and soon, of proximity to the nuclear test the Russians conducted to celebrate Stalin’s 70th birthday, Sashka will remember this as the happiest time of his life.
The last time (perhaps the only time) we heard about a Kazakh flick was Borat. This time we see Kazakhstan, its expanse, its water, its otherworldliness. We get a glimpse of its religious rituals as the fur-hatted healer makes a blessing and of its helplessness in the face of Russian exploitation. We meet those exiles who have been dumped into the lives of the natives and we are gratified by how they try to build a community as a buffer against all the violence they suffer.
Told in the voice of the grown-up Sashka, now living in Jerusalem, this is one of those unique introductions to a world so distant that only the shared understanding of rape, oppression and love allows us to fully empathize. This is a harsh film but worthy in the best sense of cinema.
Sue - If the film is nearly as poignant and well-written as your review, it is a "must see".
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