Krotká DVD

One day, a Russian woman living in a remote village receives a package back that she sent to her imprisoned husband. Frightened and full of worries, she embarks on a picturesque journey to a distant part of the country where the prison stands, which for many is more like an impregnable fortress. She faces bureaucratic absurdity, treacherous characters from the social underbelly, insults, violence, and the realization that the dungeon does not end with walls and barbed wire, but continues far beyond their boundaries. Loznic's latest film is an uncompromising allegory about the state of the Russian soul and the current culture of imprisonment as a legacy of Stalin's social engineering, a part of the state machinery and instruments of power. The director's description of a struggle, inspired by the works of Dostoevsky, Kafka, and Gogol, unusually blends brutal realism with expressionistically conceived satire. Krotká is a radical political film about a country where both authorities and people play the role of phantoms – serving as empty shells that merely imitate the function they should fulfill.