A young sailor descends from a local train. He goes to a nearby forest, which is full of strange men in medical uniforms behaving in an absurd and eccentric manner. The sailor falls under their influence and masochistically gives himself up to them only to be disemboweled by the werewolf orderlies. The sailor’s last unconscious image is a “white ship sailing towards the horizon”—a Soviet symbol for happiness and joy.
Werewolf Orderlies is the first of Evgenii Iufit’s films in which the necrorealist aesthetics of social grotesque and black humor appear. —rusfilm.pitt.edu
Evgenii Iufit (Yevgeny Yufit) was born in 1961 in Saint Petersburg, Russia. In the early 1980s he began working as a painter and art photographer. In 1985 he set up the first independent film studio in Russia, MZHALALA FILM, which brought together artists, writers, directors and others sympathetic to radical aesthetic experimentation.
At this studio Iufit made a number of films which have been shown at the world’s major film festivals including Montreal, Locarno, Toronto, Rotterdam, and Moscow. His film, Daddy, Frost is Dead, was awarded the Grand Prix at the Rimini Film Festival in Italy. Iufit’s paintings and photographs have been shown in major exhibitions of contemporary Russian art since 1985, at the State Russian Museum, St. Petersburg; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; Kunstahalle, Dusseldorf; Kunstverein, Hanover, and The Museum of Modern Art, Mexico City. Works by Iufit are to be found in museums, galleries, and private collections both… read more