Alina Rudnitskaya: Civil Status
I am in Riga for the Baltic Sea Forum (BSF) for new documentary projects to be pitched this coming weekend. The BSF, however, includes a hig quality film programme for the general public at the Cinema K. Suns in Riga.
One of the films to be shown is ”Civil Status” by Alina Rudnitskaya, a brilliant observational documentary filmed at the Civil Registry office in St. Petersburg, where people come to have births, marriages, divorces and deaths registered. ”It’s like a theatre here”, one says in the beginning of the film, and it indeed is, the Theatre of Life. This has obviously been the aim of the director – to catch these emotional moments, where people come to have their divorces registered or to get married. The young women working in the office have a job that shifts from being verbally attacked and called idiots, to situations where they are subject to flirt, or where they master the happy ceremony of marriage. Faces, joy, sorrow, fun, despair… the camera stays sometimes at a distance and sometimes it goes very close. That close that we are watching a couple having a dialogue of reconciliation, or to be more precise, she tells him ”that there was nothing between us”, and begs him not to sign but walk home and give it another chance. Dramatic scenes like this are in the film.
It’s all very well composed, rythmical, with atmosphere conveyed, and lives up to what a documentary should be: multilayered and universal. And about Life.
Russia, St. Petersburg Documentary Film Studio, 29 mins., 2005
