Ekaterina Troepolskaya

“Great Poetry” is about two guys who live on the outskirts of Moscow and work as cash collectors. They’re young, lonely, and all they have in the world is each other. They spend their lives moving money for other people. They attend a poetry class at the local cultural center and watch cockfights at a dorm for migrant workers. Their attempts at finding poetry in the prosaic world around lead them to the conclusion that the only poetic move they can make is to rob a bank. The film isn’t about words or rhymes. It’s about friendship and betrayal, and about our vicious and alien world in which anyone who tries to be honest and consistent ends up looking naïve and cruel. It’s about the everpresent and incomprehensible force that — in spite of everything — makes our life so frantic, strange, and lonely

All day long the TV shows an ice-hole. Ice-holes are the theme of the day, a winter tradition that unites believers and sportsmen, stars and walruses, the president and the unemployed. In the centre of the news reports are the topics of Baptism, fishing and the criminal chronicle. The president and a pike, the artist and the crit- ics, the oligarch and the law enforcement team – they all meet at an ice- hole in search of solutions for their problems. The jobless Muscovite, with bad habits, dives down an ice-hole for a wife, just like Sadko. The fairy- tale plots intertwine with documentary context, and it is no longer clear where reality ends. Remember Nietzsche: if you long gaze into the abyss, the abyss will also gaze into you.