This excellent low-key documentary records the daily life of an elderly blind man in Russia. He spends his days at home in a tiny flat making bags out of string. His only companion is a cat, which persists in unraveling the man’s bags and tangling the thread. Once the man has completed a set of string bags, he goes out to the street-corner and tries to give them away to passersby for free. Sadly, no one wants them, even though they are much nicer than the grimy plastic bags commonly used on that street. —IMDb
Sergey Dvortsevoy (born in 1962) worked as an aviation engineer before studying film in Moscow in the early 1990s. His films immediately garnered international acclaim, receiving prizes and recognition at festivals around the world, including the nomination of Bread Day (1998) for the prestigious Joris Ivens Award at the Amsterdam International Documentary Film Festival. The following year his work was presented at the Robert Flaherty Film Seminar, an institution dedicated to Flaherty’s adherence to the goal of seeing and depicting the human condition. Dvortsevoy’s documentaries are committed to observational filmmaking. His subjects — people living in and around a Russia in transition — try in their individual ways to eke out an existence. Tulpan is his first fiction film, which has been nominated into the 2009 Asia Pacific Screen Awards for Best Feature Film and Best Achievement in Directing. —Wikipedia