One thing that may be said for certain it is that Alexei Gherman is a director of passion and perseverance. In nearly thirty years, the Leningrad-born director has succeeded in completing only four films. Checkpoint (a.k.a. Trial on the Road), finished in 1971, was immediately shelved for fifteen years. Twenty Years Without War (1976), while admired by many, including Andrei Tarkovsky, was essentially undistributed until 1986. My Friend Ivan Lapshin (1982), his most famous film to date, was based on stories written by his father and recreates the material hardships and paranoid psychology of Soviet life during the 1930s. The film was promptly banned by the commissars only to be among the first films freed under glasnost. It recently was ranked by a Russian critics’ poll as one of the ten best films in Soviet History. Gherman's long-awaited new film, Khrustaliov, My Car!, was seven years in production. Inspired by Joseph Brodsky's essay "In a Room and a Half," the film received its world premiere at the 1998 Cannes Film Festival and has been shown to great critical acclaim in festivals throughout the world. To date, however, it has found no U.S. distribution.

The time is the winter of 1953, the place is Moscow. In this masterpiece of disorientation, Gherman creates a consistently amazing visual and aural rendition of the charged atmosphere of those sad times, in which no point of view is ever fixed, nor any shadow devoid of possible danger, nor any stray remark free from potentially lethal consequences. Taking off from the infamous ‘Doctor’s Plot,’ Gherman tells the story of Yuri Glinshi, Red Army general and famous brain surgeon, who is sent to the Gulag after an anti-Semitic purge. An odd mixture of jumpiness, exhaustion, and confusion permeates Gherman’s lustrous black-and-white images, adding up to an eye-opening representation of what it’s like to live in a totalitarian society where something monumental is taking place, although no one knows precisely what, nor when or how it will break. Profoundly personal, unrelentingly tough and oddly affirmative, Khrustaliov, My Car! is as brave as filmmaking gets. It is also an altogether towering achievement.