As part of my Konstam residency at the Calvert 22 Café, I'll be teaming up for the second week in a row with Kino Vino's Alissa Timoshkina to present a night of food and film with flavours from eastern Europe and Russia.

We'll be presenting a rare screening of the remarkable Soviet movie The Commissar, a once-banned gem of world cinema about a female officer in the Bolshevik army whose pregnancy forces her to make difficult decisions that will change the course of her life.

Tickets include a welcome drink and snacks created by Oliver and Alissa to accompany the film, and an extended introduction by Dr Alissa Timoshkina.

The Commissar
USSR, 1967, dir. Aleksander Askoldov, 110 mins

Based on a short story by a renowned Soviet-Jewish writer Vasily Grossman, this remarkable film was made during the Soviet New Wave and tells a story of a Red Army commissar who temporarily lodges with a poor Jewish family to give birth in the midst of the Russian Civil War (1917 – 1922). The Commissar is a sensitive and elegiac portrait of a mostly vanished culture, filmed with a unique poetic vision. The film was banned upon its completion and not shown to the public until 1988. 

More about the film here.