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To celebrate the release of Brief Encounters and The Long Farewell coming to Blu-Ray, DVD and Digital on September 18th we have 2 sets of both Blu-Rays to give away!

Studiocanal are pleased to announce their Vintage World Classics release of two seminal works by female director Kira Muratova, one of the leading figures in Ukranian and Russian cinema. Brief Encounters and The Long Farewell have been beautifully restored in 4k and, following their premiere in Bologna at the Cinema Ritrovata Festival, will be available for the first time in the UK on Blu-ray, DVD and Digital from 18 September.

Brief Encounters (1967) was the debut feature from Kira Muratova, and shows the beginnings of her impressionistic style, blending observational realism with new wave experimentation. Through an intricate play of flashbacks and shifting perspectives, Brief Encounters reveals the intricate love triangle, connecting a hard-nosed city planner (played by Muratova herself), her free-spirited geologist...

Made in Russian at Odesa Film Studio in the aftermath of de-Stalinization, Kira Muratova’s Brief Encounters and The Long Farewell nonetheless faced censorship for ignoring the precepts of socialist realism. They make for fruitful viewing as a diptych, sharing in certain themes, motifs, and, above all, a rulebook-shredding attitude to cinematic form. Neither overtly criticize Soviet life, yet they smuggle in a discontent that’s detectable less by what they condemn than by what they frame instead: the domestic, the psychological, the interpersonal. What’s surprising isn’t that they got banned, but that Muratova managed to get them made at all. Now especially, watching these two films feels like something of a miracle.

Brief Encounters, from 1967, tells the story of Nadya (Nina Ruslanova), a young woman who leaves her village to work as a housekeeper for Valya (Muratova), committee member to a provincial Odesa district, and her husband,...

Absurdist film director who emerged from the Soviet shadows in the era of perestroika

At the Berlin film festival in February 1990, the winner of the Silver Bear – the special jury prize – was The Asthenic Syndrome, an extraordinarily original film from the Soviet Union, directed by Kira Muratova, who has died aged 83. The period of perestroika (reconstruction) from 1985 onwards allowed Muratova to emerge from the shadows and make her absurdist masterpiece unencumbered by the draconian strictures of socialist realism. Nevertheless, because of “obscenity” – there was both male and female full-frontal nudity – it was the only film to be banned in the Soviet Union during perestroika, though that ban was lifted soon after the Berlin award.

Right from the start of Muratova’s career as a director in 1961, she was an irritant to the regime. Her first solo directed feature, Brief Encounters (1967), was shelved until the advent of perestroika. A ménage à trois,...