About

'We didn't really want to depict 1953, we wanted to show what Russians are like.' - Aleksei German

Aleksei German’s black comedy Khrustalyov, My Car! is a baroque, absurdist examination of the final gasps of Stalinism. The film follows Klensky (Yuri Tsurilo), a barrel-chested, mustachioed military officer and surgeon who oversees a large Moscow hospital. After accidentally stumbling upon his doppelgänger in a hidden room at the hospital, he realises that a double is being prepared to confess to false crimes at a shot trial so that he can be purged. Knowing that this means a one-way trip to a gulag, he decides he must go into hiding – but his desperate attempts at escape only seem to take him further down a rabbit hole.

Shot and edited over seven years, and produced with a mix of Russian and French funding, Khrustalyov, My Car! is an immersive fever dream of a film. German infuses every frame with paranoia and wild surrealism: characters dance and roar seemingly without cause, busts of Stalin and mounted animal heads loom over every interior, while voices topple over each other in a mix of whispers and shouts. Recently restored in 2K, this is an intricately designed portrait of a world in collapse, with German plunging the audience into the madness.

Please note: this film contains a scene of impactful sexual violence.

Ages 18+