Brief Encounters

Synopsis

In Kira Muratova’s 1967 feature Brief Encounters, Muratova plays Valentina, a Ukrainian city councilor imprisoned in her conventionalities and performance as a model Soviet citizen. Her charming geologist husband Maksim periodically abandons her for his work in the field where he meets Nadia, a young waitress. Soon, Nadia travels to the city where she lands a job as a housekeeper in Valentina’s home. Nadia’s new vocation enables these two women’s narratives to interweave and reveal their emotional dependencies and dissatisfactions. Notorious for her sharp morality and nihilism, Muratova’s film, like most who bordered on a critique of the system – in this case one that had promised utopian love but resulted in a double burden of balancing work and home – was banned until perestroika.
Dorota Lech

Director Biography

Kira Muratova (b. 1934, Soroki, Moldova - d. 2018, Odesa, Ukraine) is both a living legend and one of the most marginalized figures in Soviet and Ukrainian cinema. During the Soviet era her work failed to conform to ideological requirements, and today it doesn’t correspond with commercial trends – in the past, her films were locked away in the censor’s vault and now they are essentially left to tour the festival circuit. Over the past 55 years she has made 20 films, each of which betrays a different aesthetic and a unique ability to articulate the most fundamental qualities of society.