37th International Film Week Mannheim

The film awakens a willingness to engage with the culture of India. Despite the film's fascination with the strange and beyond all the social tensions of a "third world country", it preserves respect and human dignity in its approach. In its honest way of reflecting on what it sees, the film enables a willingness to observe without claiming that the West's way of seeing is the standard for the joy of life and the future of a common world. We consider the restraint exercised in the film to be exemplary for approaching realities that are not readily accessible to us.

The film describes the difficult existence of a creative writer in the Soviet Union of the 1920s in anarchic images of great visual suggestiveness. Supported by solid, often brilliant camerawork, the grotesque, ludicrous ideas in the screenplay are also fascinating evidence of the joie de vivre and will to survive of a group of young, talented artists who use wit and black humour to defend themselves against boredom and inhumanity in a country condemned as humourless.