Listen If It's Raining...

Listen If It's Raining... (1999) is a Russian drama you can watch online on iFILM. Rather than a standard biography, it's an associative portrait of the writer Yuri Kazakov, who lived from 1927 to 1982. Arkady Kordon directs.

The title comes from the last story Kazakov never finished. Time runs loose here: the present slides into the past, reality into half-dream, and the plot keeps surfacing motifs from his stories — "Trali-vali," "Blue and Green," "You Cried Bitterly in Your Sleep." The hero might bump into Stalin or share vodka with a vagrant in a cellar. Strands of Bunin's "Chang's Dreams" are woven in too.

The cast includes Aleksey Petrenko, Irina Kupchenko, Albert Filozov and Valery Ivchenko. For Elena Mayorova, the role of Death was her final screen appearance, with Yulia Rutberg providing the voice. This is slow, literary cinema about an intellectual's fate under Soviet rule — for viewers who'll take poetry over plot. Stream Listen If It's Raining... (1999) online on iFILM.