This Freudian feature documentary, produced during perestroika, introduced the world of Freud’s ideas to audiences in the former Soviet Union for the first time, since his works had been banned by Communist Party censorship. The film is structured as a journey through time starting from the Lumière brothers’ Arrival of a Train, presented in 1896 (the year when Freud published his Interpretation of Dreams) to 1939, when Freud died. The film juxtaposes a dialog between the filmmaker and the patriarch of psychoanalyses himself with the history of the Soviet Union and Europe.
Andrei Zagdansky was born in 1956 in Kyiv. He graduated from the Kyiv State Institute of Theatrical Arts. Worked at Kyivnaukfilm studio in 1981-1988. Zagdansky was a member (1988-1996) and secretary (1990-1992) of the FIlmmakers Union of Ukraine. In 1992 he emigrated to the USA, where he read lectures on the history of cinema at New York New School University and founded the independent studio AZFilms (1996). His feature documentaries have won numerous awards at international fests, starting from his very first film in 1990.
(Selected): Interpretation of Dreams (1989), Vasya (2002), Konstantin and Mouse (2006), Orange Winter (2007), My Father Evgeni (2010)
