Synopsis
The Red Snowball Tree (1974) is Vasily Shukshin's final film — watch it online on iFILM. He wrote it, directed it, and starred as Egor Prokudkin, an ex-convict who walks out of prison and travels to a Siberian village to meet Lyuba, a woman he knows only from letters, determined to leave his criminal past behind.
The village is slow to open up. Lyuba is played by Shukshin's real wife Lidiya Fedoseyeva-Shukshina, and the scenes between them carry a weight that doesn't come from the script alone. Ivan Ryzhov, Georgy Burkov, and Lev Durov fill the world around them with faces that read as found rather than cast. Egor's former associates, however, have no interest in his new chapter.
Shukshin died the same year, at 45, on the set of another film. The Red Snowball Tree took the USSR State Prize and has endured as one of Soviet cinema's most intimate documents — a story about a man trying to change, told without sentimentality, where the tragedy arrives not as a dramatic twist but as something that was always coming. Stream The Red Snowball Tree online on iFILM.
Starring
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