DIRECTED BY ANDREY KHRZHANOVSKY

“An enchanting elegiac memory piece. The action smoothly interweaves historical footage and animated passages
as it moves through a pivotal moment in Soviet history from the final years of the Stalin era through the advent of Khrushchev. Khrzhanovsky has a lovely light touch and here’s hoping he gets to make more films like this.”
– Gavin Smith, Film Comment

“A magical, wildly creative fantasia. Seamlessly wedding fiction, docu footage, animation and stills…
Khrzhanovsky has created his own poetry. A Room and a Half is unmistakably the work of a mature artist,
and it’s the helmer’s absolute mastery of the different formats that makes his work so joyous.”
– Jay Weissberg, Variety

“A multiple-award-winner in Russia for his animation work, Andrey Khrzhanovsky’s semi-fictionalized biography of Nobel prize-winning poet Josef Brodsky is a lively, dense and richly imaginative portrait not only of a great writer but also of the post-Second World War cultural world of the Soviet Union. Witty, charming… also splendidly acted by the whole cast.”
– Dan Fainaru, Screen International

Joseph Brodsky, the Russian-Jewish-American poet, won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1987 and was made poet laureate of the U.S. in 1991. Given that he was expelled from the USSR in 1972, it’s not surprising that much of his writing deals with themes of exile, loss and memory. An imagined return to the parents he never saw again and his childhood home of St. Petersburg (“a city whose color was fossilized vodka”) is the essence of this wonderfully nostalgic, whimsical movie. Made by famed Russian animator Andrey Khrzhanovsky, A ROOM AND A HALF recalls the glory years of a much-loved child and the particular absurdities and indignities suffered by Jews under the Soviet regime in the ’50s and ’60s. The filmmaker’s light touch — his use of animation, stills, archival footage, and scripted, dramatic material — melds the sophisticated surrealism of Magritte with the folk mysticism of Chagall.
With support from the Joan S. Constantiner Fund for Jewish and Holocaust Film

RUSSIA • 2009 •  130 MINS •  IN RUSSIAN WITH ENGLISH SUBTITLES • SEAGULL FILMS