A triptych of scenes from one the Soviet Union’s most popular films of all time Circus, in Russian Tsirk, the story of a female American Circus performer, shamed in the US by her illegitimate black child. She flees to Moscow and after a few ups and downs finds love and racial harmony in the Utopian [...]

Vera and Sergei are greeted by African students at the dormitory. As mentioned in the previous post about the film.

Malenkya Vera, Little Vera, or Little Hope is the story of run-of-the-mill teen angst taking vengeance upon the family unit. We are shown the destructiveness of not listening to one’s elders. Rambunctious Vera with her garbled red-herring fancies ruins the lives of her mother, father, brother, and lover husband. She is left with nothing but [...]

This image, that I like for Genna’s profile, comes from the scene where Genna first meets Tolya. Here the fighters feel each other out in the first round of their bout. As Tolya is significantly older we have a battle of young vs old, or experience vs naivety as well as black vs white, or [...]