A young woman is taken hostage by a police officer and subsequently abused by the lawman gone mad.
The critics unanimously acknowledge Cargo 200 as one of the most significant films of the year, and many consider it to be Russian director Alexey Balabanov’s (Brother, Of Freaks And Men) best film yet.
The film, a gritty thriller based on actual events that becomes the blackest of black comedies, is set in 1984, provincial Russia, where the gloom of Soviet life has reached extreme depths. Balabanov presents an unremittingly dark and unflinching portrait of the decline of the Soviet era. The title refers to the Soviet term for military corpses returning from Afghanistan. Guaranteed to shock even the most strong-stomached of moviegoers, Cargo 200 is one of the most controversial movies ever to emerge from Russia. –www.disinfo.com
Aleksei Balabanov was born on February 25, 1959 in Sverdlovsk (now Yekaterinburg). In 1981 he graduated from Translation Faculty of Gorky Teachers’ Training University. From 1983 to 1987 Alexei worked as an assistant of a film director at Sverdlovsk film studio. Later Balabanov studied at the experimental course “Authors’ Cinema” of the High Courses for Scriptwriters and Film Directors, graduating in 1990.
Balabanov started his creative career in “big cinema” in 1991 with directing his first full-length feature Shchastlivyye dni (Happy Days) after his own script. In the same year he became the co-author of the script Pogranichniy Conflict (Frontier Conflict) by the young film director Nadezhda Khvorova. In 1992 Aleksei Balabanov together with producers Sergei Selyanov and Vasily Grigor’ev established the STV Film Company, which later participated in creation of almost all of his films.
In 1994 the film director released Zamok (The Castle) after the famous novel by Frantz… read more
This film is up on YouTube with English subtitles so watch it before it gets taken down. Certainly gives a different view of the mid 80's in the CCCP as compared to the nostalgia the people who lived at those times seem to be falling into. Utterly grim yet fascinating film.
Completely engrossing and alienating at the same time - this film drags the viewer through increasingly bizarre tension until its ultimate collapse. The real beauty of Cargo 200 is the marriage of enigmatic and simplistic storytelling.
Cargo 200 is a pitiless, despairing and hopeless depiction of an aspect of Soviet provincial life during the Union’s last stages of existence. The year is 1984; the dead in the misadventure of Afghanistan… read review