ZERO CITY // High-Brow/Low-Brow/Uni-Brow

1662 Broadway Boulevard,Kansas City MO 64108

23 January, 2023

Description

dir: JKaren Shakhnazarov - 1988 - 1 hr 41 min Part Kafka, part Agatha Christie and part Monty Python, director Karen Shakhnazarov’s surreal 1988 satire of Communism ZEROGRAD (ZERO CITY) follows an Everyman engineer named Varakin (Leonid Filatov) who arrives in a remote city where nothing quite makes sense, but everyone acts as if it does. The more complex and absurdist the mystery becomes, the more poignant and plaintive Varakin’s predicament – “I have to get back to Moscow,” he pleads to no avail. Along the way we’re treated to a bizarre and wonderful sideshow of non sequiturs out of a Wes Anderson film, including an underground museum filled with a thousand years of real and imagined Russian history (“Here’s the pistol with which Urusov shot the False Dimitry II.”) Frozen in time, frozen far beneath the surface, the waxwork figures are strangely beautiful and forlorn, like Shakhnazarov’s marvelous and enigmatic satire of Soviet bureaucracy. With music by the great Eduard Artemyev (SOLARIS, STALKER). (In Russian with English subtitles.) High-Brow/Low-Brow/Uni-Brow is a monthly film series programmed by Andrew Linn dedicated to exploring films from every corner of taste and seeing what they have to say with each other. Proof of vaccination or proof of negative test within the past 48 hours will be required to enter Stray Cat Film Center. Please contact us with any questions. Updated Mask Policy: To follow current CDC recommendations and comply with the current mask mandate in Kansas City Missouri, masks will be mandatory at Stray Cat Film Center. For the safety of other patrons and our volunteers, please keep your mask on unless you are actively eating or drinking. Thank you for complying, let us know if you have any questions.