Trans Sibirian Express: Angels of the Revolution

Director: Aleksei Fedorchenko

1934: the legendary Communist fighter, the beautiful Polina-Revoluzia, is asked by the newborn Soviet government to bring order to the north of the Soviet Union. The shamans of the two native populations, Khanty and Nenets, refuse the new ideology. Polina convinces five of her friends to go with her, former colleagues-in-arms who have now become metropolitan artists: a composer, a sculptor, a theatre director, a Constructivist architect, a famous director. They will have to try and reconcile the culture of the Russian Avant-garde with the Ancient Paganism of the peoples who live in the virgin forest around the great Siberian river Ob. The film is based on a true story. Russian director Aleksei Fedorchenko (director of the Celestial Wives of the Meadow Mari, to be screened on January 25) again delves into the lives of his country’s ethnic minorities. Angels of Revolution, a visual feast depicting the cultural clash of a group of idealist Russian avant-garde artists with the tribes they aim to bring into the nascent Soviet Union's ideological fold in the early 1930s.

Trans Sibirian Express Programme