Beanpole

Very bleak and somewhat compelling – a film I admired more than I liked

The basis for the Stakhanov movement was first and foremost the radical improvement in the material welfare of the workers. Life has improved, comrades. Life has become more joyous. And when life is joyous, work goes well. Hence the high rates of output. Hence the heroes and heroines of labour. That, primarily, is the root of the Stakhanov movement. If there had been a crisis in our country, if there had been unemployment – that scourge of the working class – if people in our country lived badly, drably, joyless__ly, we should have had nothing like the Stakhanov movement.

• Joseph Stalin; Speech at the First All-Union Conference of Stakhanovites (November 17, 1935)

Nothing has contributed so much to the corruption of the original idea of socialism as the belief that Russia is a socialist country and that every act of its rulers must be excused, if not imitated. And so for the last ten years, I have been convinced that the destruction of the Soviet myth was essential if we wanted a revival of the socialist movement.

• George Orwell; Preface to the Ukrainian edition of Animal Farm (March, 1947)

Written by Kantemir Balagov (Tesnota) and Aleksandr Terekhov (Matilde) and directed by Balagov, Dylda [Beanpole] is inspired by (although not based on) The Unwomanly Face of War by Svetlana Alexievich. An oral history of the experiences of Russian women who fought during World War II, the book was originally published in 1985 in a heavily censored version, after Soviet authorities told Alexievich she should be writing not about "filth" but about victory (her uncensored original text was eventually published in 2017). When she was announced as the winner of the 2015 Nobel Prize in Literature, the chair of the Swedish Academy, Sara Danius, called her writing "a monument to courage and suffering in our time". And so we have Dylda, which has a hell of a lot of suffer...