The Outskirts (1998 film)
7.4 /10 1 Votes7.4
80% Rotten Tomatoes Director Pyotr Lutsik Duration | 7.8/10 IMDb 62% Genre Drama Country Russia | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
![]() | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Release date 1998 (1998) (Russia) Writer Pyotr Lutsik, Aleksey Samoryadov Music director Georgy Sviridov, Gavriil Popov Screenplay Pyotr Lutsik, Aleksei Samoryadov Cast (Kolka Poluyanov), Viktor Venes (The Lykov Bros #2), Yuri Dubrovin (Filipp Safronov), Viktor Stepanov (The Master), Aleksei Vanin (Vasili Perfilyev)Similar movies The Patriots (1933), Luna Park (1992), The Chekist (1992), Father and Son (2003), The Fool (2014) |
Russian farmer Filipp Safronov (Yuri Dubrovin) is dispossessed of his land by a shadowy group of government officials who hand it over to a powerful oil company. So Filipp rounds up some of his angriest and most violent friends and hits the road, planning to figure out exactly who is in control and then exact revenge. They track down corrupt bureaucrats one by one and torture them until they reveal who gave them their orders, following the trail of rapacious capitalism all the way to Moscow.
The Outskirts (Russian: , meaning Outskirts), also known by the transliterated Russian title Okraina, is a 1998 Russian film starring Yuri Dubrovin, Nikolay Olyalin, Alexey Pushkin, and Alexey Vanin. Loosely based on Boris Barnets 1933 film Outskirts, it was directed and written by Pyotr Lutsik.
Set on the Russian steppes and filmed in black-and-white, it is the story of a group of peasants seeking revenge against the oil company that bought the collective farm from beneath their feet and the return of their land. During the entire film, it does not stop snowing once. As the peasants make their way across the frozen tundra toward the city that houses oil company headquarters, they take vengeance against a series of former Communist bureaucrats who connived with oil company executives. Except for the youth Kolya that they have drafted into their crusade against the protestations of his babushka-wearing mother, they are all grizzled veterans of WWII.
Synopsis
The film starts as parody of a Soviet-era socialist realist film-making of the 1930s (The title is taken from the classic 1933 film by the Soviet filmmaker Boris Barnet, in which the beginning of the farm collectivization era is depicted.)
Peaceful life of farmers of remote Uralian village is interrupted when their former collective farm is sold. The toughest ones unite and track down the offenders one by one. Their quest for truth and justice is very violent, although almost all the violence occurs off screen, and often we are unsure of the victims fate. The movie was shot in black and white and the music is old Soviet movie music, so it is hard to determine when the events are happening – around World War II or maybe even today. Hence it could be interpreted as attack on modern capitalism in Russia.
References
The Outskirts (1998 film) WikipediaOkraina (1998 film) IMDbOkraina (1998 film) Rotten TomatoesOkraina (1998 film) MetacriticThe Outskirts (1998 film) themoviedb.org