Synopsis
Paper Soldier (Bumazhny Soldat, 2008) is Aleksei German Jr.'s drama, available to watch online on iFILM. It is the spring of 1961 on the bare steppe near Baikonur, and physician Daniil Pokrovsky has only weeks to ready the first cosmonauts for their launch.
Daniil is a man pulled apart. He sends brave men toward a flight that could kill them and cannot stop shaking with fear for them. At the same time he drifts between two women, his wife and his mistress, as helpless in love as he is about everything else. Merab Ninidze plays him as an exhausted idealist, while Chulpan Khamatova and Anastasiya Shevelyova are the women who keep holding on to him.
German turned away from the space-race epic and made an elegy for the Thaw-era intelligentsia running out of air. Alisher Khamidkhodzhaev's hazy, rain-soaked images won a cinematography prize, and the film itself claimed the Silver Lion for directing at Venice. Stream Paper Soldier (2008) online on iFILM.
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