The Island of Redemption


The Island (Ostrov)
Russia, 2006
Directed by Pavel Semyonovich Lungin

The Island (Ostrov, 2006) is an award-winning film by the renowned Russian director Pavel Semyonovich Lungin which, perhaps, hasn’t yet achieved the full recognition that it deserves. The film begins in 1942 in a remote part of Russia where a sailor, Anatoly (Pyotr Mamonov) and his captain, Tikhon are captured by the Nazis as they board their barge and tugboat which is shipping coal. The Nazi officer leading the raid offers Anatoly the perverse choice of shooting Tikhon to stay alive, which Anatoly reluctantly takes and Tikhon falls overboard. Though the Nazis blow up the ship, Anatoly is found by monks the next morning. They take him to an island where he subsequently becomes a stoker at the monastery, but he is overcome with guilt.

During his subsequent life on the island, Father Anatoly has carried on his back the hardest of sins; the sin of betrayal and the sin of cowardice. The belief that he has murdered his captain in order to gamble with saving his own life is something that has scarred his soul. No matter how much he wishes for it, death doesn't come. Thirty years later, Anatoly now has the gift of clairvoyance and healing, with many people coming to him for cures and guidance, but he remains in a perpetual state of repentance over Tikhon. A prominent admiral arrives with his daughter to see Anatoly. The daughter is possessed by demons but Anatoly attempts to exorcise them. The admiral is someone from Anatoly’s past….

Through the main character of father Anatoly, director Pavel Lungin, has magically succeeded in reflecting the whole universe as the controversial character comes to symbolise life and death on many levels. Anatoly reaches, in its cruellest way, the worst in life and the best in death. Life and its contradictions, the life in which sense often can not be found, is none the less the place where we belong and where peace will only come if in death you have succeeded in clearing the hardships that you carry within yourself.

Lungin’s portrayal of this small religious island community is directed with a dramatic sense of atmosphere in location and characterisation. The people that come to Anatoly for help, who are also fighting prejudices and disbeliefs, are welcomed by the beautiful landscape of the island. The sea and the expansion are very cold but full of life as well, with the people at one with nature, beautiful in their peace and expectation, overcoming fear with the strength to accept the different. Also, with equal doses of humour, Lungin portrays the positive and the negative aspects, the open-mindedness and the narrow-mindedness, of the lonely monastery. This transforms The Island into a perfectly complicated picture in which the whole universe with its contrasts is reverberated.

The Island is a powerfully unique and brilliant film which manages to capture perfection by portraying the world and its whole complexity through one echoing moment of erratic resonance. In the end, the film culminates with irony. The irony which, like an antithesis, and in keeping with the films depiction of opposites, plays with the extremes of fate. The cowardice of Anatoly is harshly punished for many years but fate will be both cruel and forgiving. At the end of the film Anatoly will finally be delivered the peace he longed for far too long, his conscience cleansed.

As a footnote, The Island has been praised by Russian film critic Olga Rebrova as probably the best film made in Russia in recent years and is continuing the best tradition of Soviet films that tell stories about people while at the same time probing their inner penitence. Such adulation only adds to the surprise at how modestly it’s fared in festival awards. Lungin was previously awarded the Best Director Prize at the Cannes Film Festival for his film Taxi Blues in 1990. The Island, meanwhile, closed the 2006 Venice Film Festival and has also received praise from Alexis II, the Russian Orthodox Church leader.

Russian Euphoria in London



Euphoria (Eyforia)
Russia, 2006
Directed by Ivan Virypayev

A most unusual and innovative work that caused a stir in the festival circuit in 2006, Euphoria (Eyforia) is renowned theatre director Ivan Virypaev’s first venture into film. His debut is a poetical piece with a commonplace but highly engaging narrative told in a highly individual style, perhaps influenced from theatre, with the perennial themes of love and jealousy dealt with in a cruel and brutal way. A young man and woman - two people who were destined to be together but for all the wrong reasons – explore their irresistible attraction and suffer the inevitable redemption. Like the River Don that forms the backdrop for the film, nature takes its course as they flow downstream. Their skin exposed to the scorching sun carries them in their boat and out towards eternity.

Russian cinema shouldn't be such a new discovery for people who like films but it is highly unique, perhaps because of cultural isolation, but at times it creates something superb and also provides us with a burst of creativity. Such is the case with Euphoria which can only be inferred as something at once shocking and indescribable, wonderful and magic. The first impressions of the film are strange because of the atmosphere it creates, but this is really something special and completely new. The tension created from no dialogue but heightened emotion comes as no surprise when we find the actors, also new to the screen, learned their trade from the theatre.


Euphoria is an emotional situation and of course is related to a superficial high, usually of a medical patient when they feel good, unusually pleasant and self-satisfied. The situation is synonymous not only with mental patients but with people who enjoy drugs and alcohol. It also relates itself to celebrating in sport, whether as a participator or spectator. However, it is also something that is temporary, and finally, it is the situation before death. This explains the approach of Virypayev, a symbolic representation of the situation in Russian society. It is a film about the love between a man and a woman but an unexpected, true and ruthless love. They saw each other only once in an intoxicated state at a wedding. Their eyes met, and that was it, a fatal attraction of sorts. The instincts and the feeling, which Virypayev explores so bravely, intelligently and even impudently, live in each of us. Euphoria is an attempt to solve the mystery of an unsolved soul. The film’s achievement is that it dramatically affects the spectator in a totally different way to the thrills of mainstream films. This is simply powerful cinema in an understated form.

The cinematography by Andrei Naidenov, with his long and majestic frames on the river, is complimented by the beautiful landscape with the intimidating spirit of the steppe. Though this is the first film of Ivan Virypayev, Naidenov has photographed over 30 films. Virypayev, however, is a truly different director and one hopes this is not the only time he will cross mediums from the theatre into film. Polina Agureeva (Vera) and Mikhail Okunev (Valeri) have come into film from theatre along with Virypayev but Maxim Ushakov (Pakha) was a theatre designer and animator, something which makes his performance in Euphoria all the more remarkable.