Room and a Half

"Former animator Andrey Khrzhanovsky combines scripted scenes, archival footage, several types of animation, and surrealist flights of fancy to create this stirring portrait of poet Joseph Brodsky and the postwar Soviet cultural scene. Exiled from his native Russia in 1972, the Nobel Prize-winning poet once claimed that if he were ever to return to the Motherland, he would do so anonymously. Stepping off from that premise, Khrzhanovsky and screenwriter Yuri Arabov have created an ironic fairy tale of a trip for Brodsky. The journey covers not only geography but time as well, as the audience is transported back to the Russia of the Fifties and Sixties to the artistic explosion that erupted in the wake of de-Stalinization and the Thaw. A Room