From May 16 to 25, Film at Lincoln Center in New York will host a retrospective of films by prominent Ukrainian director and screenwriter Kira Muratova, winner of the Taras Shevchenko National Prize and the Oleksandr Dovzhenko State Prize.
In general, the retrospective entitled Kira Muratova: Sketches of Chaos brings together 16 films that have never been shown in the United States before.
The program will be opened with a restored version of the 1989 film Asthenic Syndrome, which was included in the list of 100 best movies in the history of Ukrainian cinema. The film consists of two short stories: the story of a woman in depression after the loss of her husband and the drama of a teacher who develops asthenic syndrome due to life’s difficulties – he involuntarily falls asleep in unacceptable situations.
The event aims to show Muratova as a unique artist who depicted a world in which society has ceased to serve the individual. Using innovative cinematic languages that were atypical for her time and context, she showed her characters trying to communicate in the face of a linguistic and emotional breakdown, and these attempts often proved doomed.
It should be noted that the Odesa director’s career lasted from the early 1960s until her death in 2018.
