Halte still - stirb - erwache

Freeze, Die, Come to Life is the harrowing story of two adolescents, Velarka (Pavel Nazarov) and Galicia (Dinara Drukarova) attempt to cope with poverty and an unstable home life in a Soviet mining town in Siberia near the close of World War II. This was the first film by Russian director, Vitaly Kanevsky, who served eight years in a Soviet labor camp.

Though the title is the name of a Russian children's game, the children here are not playing any games; the stakes are too high. Velarka's mother is a prostitute and the family is poor. Both he and Galicia must sell tea to workers, convicts, and local Japanese POWs in order to survive. Their relationship starts out as antagonistic but they slowly develop a friendship and grudging admiration for each other.

Left to fend for himself, Valerka gets into serious misadventures such as putting yeast in a school sewer causing an overflow onto the city streets, derailing a train, and helping to rob a jewelry store. He must keep running to avoid the police and pursuing jewel thieves. Though the film is bleak, the sensitive relationship of the children and the courage they display is what will stay with you. The ending is grisly but (anticipating Kiarostami's Taste of Cherry by eight years) the cameraman giving directions to the actors reminds us that "it's also a movie".

Freeze, Die, Come to Life was turned down by Russian censors and had to be edited several times before it was approved, giving it a somewhat disjointed feeling. In its final version, however, it won the 1990 Cannes Film Festival's prize for Best First Film. Unfortunately, it received scant distribution in the West and has become an overlooked gem.

"Freeze Die Come to Life" - Vitaliy Kanevskiy's autobiographical drama. Post-war hungry years, a small city in the Far East. Around devastation, dirt, evil faces, former criminals, complete hopelessness. Only the friendship of 12-year-olds, a boy and a girl, living in the same hut, like a light ray in this dark scary surrounding world. Laureate of many film festivals, including Cannes. Fact: The author of the film, he was born in the Far East, and then served 8 years in prison.

Very interesting look into stark Soviet history, in the time of Gulags and "work settlements," as told through the eyes of children who live there.

In between the squalid conditions, flowers of humanity sprout out, in the form of friendship and ill-appreciated loyalties. This is a tale of understanding what life may or must have been like in such settlements. It strikes a chord with those who can or try to understand such environments. The analogies are quite interesting, as they are critical. (Take the scene for instance, of the parade through the sewage around the school, while hoisting Stalin's portrait on high.)

While not as other Russian imports (VOR/THE THIEF, BURNT BY THE SUN or the French-Russian film, THE EAST), ZAMRI, UMRI, VOSKRESNI! has a message and a decent story to tell.

Recommended.

The director received funding for a 10-minute film and used those miniscule funds to make the most spirited film ever made (in my opinion), an extremely moving piece about two children in Siberia. The film is loose-as-a-goose -- there's never been a movie as "un-rigid" as this. In my mind it's a bookend to another film about children, the Spanish film "Spirit of the Beehive." But where that film's depth is in its poetry and mystery, this film's depth is in its emotions and sheer good-fellowship. They're opposites. Except that, to me, there's never been two better films. Why hasn't Kanevsky's second film, "An Independent Life," been released in the U.S.? Why has the second film of Victor Erice (the Spanish director), "The South," been virtually unseen in the U.S.? (It's as good as "Spirit of the Beehive.") I tell you... seeing those films will spoil you for nearly every other film!

I have seen "Don't Move, Die and Rise Again" described as one of the grimmest studies of childhood on film. Superficially, yes, but the young hero, Valerka, has a resilience that allows him to cope with most of the situations in which he finds himself. Children in Dickens or the Brontes often suffer far more. But, having said that, the setting of the first three-quarters of the film is almost unbelievably drab and depressing. We are in a mining community situated not far from Vladivostok during the season where snow is melting into slush and mud; the time, shortly after the end of World War II. Valerka, who lives with his unmarried mother, is an extremely streetwise early teenager. He makes what little money he can by brewing cups of tea for miners coming off their shifts and vies with Galia, another girl tea vendor in claims for making it from the freshest water. Their rivalry turns into a camaraderie which is developed and sustained throughout a film that is otherwise rather short on character interest. For the rest, it is the spirit of place that predominates, with a stark naturalism that reminds me at times of the "Bill Douglas Trilogy" with its equally uncompromising depiction of an unlovely semi-industrial wasteland. Only in the last half-hour is there much action. After being responsible for a minor train derailment, Valerka flees his home only to get involved with a gang of thieves. The ending is tragic but at the same time rather inconclusive. By having a discursive opening and middle and an action packed conclusion, the film suffers from erratic pacing. I also found it much less involving and consequently less moving that its material would suggest. Just another piece of Russian misery, then? Not quite. It contains several uneasy images that one recalls long after it is over, several of amputees and an extraordinary closeup of a passer by in a quiet street, smiling to reveal rows of grotesque metallic crowns. Above all "Don't Move, Die and Rise Again" has the virtue of memorability.