With Love, Lilly

Colour, 35 mm
Russia, 2002, 96 min
Section: East of the West
Oficiální stránky: www.flash.to/sadilova

Synopsis

Lilly works at a poultry processing plant. The conditions are terrible but in the provincial town where she lives she has little choice. Thus, it’s hardly surprising that she engages in romantic daydreaming about love and marriage. A hotel receptionist arranges dates for her and, despite the fact that they are invariably unattractive married men, she puts great energy into preparing for them. She idealizes the men, writes them naive love letters, and sometimes must even face the aggression of their wives. When a fortune-teller assures her that she’ll find happiness with a man named Boris, she confides her love plans to her friends and even finds a wedding dress. Then she sees her dream groom’s fiancée wearing the same frock. In shock, she gets into a taxi, the same one she once used to escape an angry wife. To her surprise, she discovers that she and the driver (named Boris) get along great. Director Larisa Sadilova has set her emotional story in the town of Orel, whose look and lifestyle precisely capture the social situation of the Russian provinces.

About the director

Larisa Sadilova (b. 1963, Briansk, Russia) graduated in acting from Moscow’s VGIK film school in 1982, where she studied under Sergei Gerasimov. Under his leadership (and at his side) she enacted a small role in the film Leo Tolstoy (1984). Since the political changes, she cofounded the Regional Public Fund for Supporting Film, and debuted as a director in 1998 with Happy Birthday, which took more than 30 festival awards. It dramatizes her own experiences at a provincial maternity hospital. The mentality and lifestyle of provincial inhabitants inspired another film she both wrote and directed, With Love, Lilly (2002), which started a successful festival run this year at Rotterdam. She currently has a comedy underway about a World War Two propaganda brigade.