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Zero City
(Gorod Zero)

Screening on Film
Directed by Karen Shakhnazarov.
With Leonid Filatov, Oleg Basilashvili, Vladimir Menshov.
USSR, 1988, 35mm, color, 103 min.
Russian with English subtitles.

One of the key films of the Perestroika era, Zero City tells the story of a Moscow engineer named Varakin who arrives in a small town with instructions to change the size of a locally manufactured air-conditioner part. At the company office he is welcomed by a naked secretary and then finds himself sitting down to a lunch where dessert is a cake that strongly resembles his own head, baked by a chef who soon shoots himself. With its images of a burdensome past and an indeterminate future based on both folk tales and more modern forms of absurdism, Shakhnazarov's very funny and poignant film is a true historical touchstone.

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