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The intimate journal of a voyage to Moscow and Saint Petersburg in Russia. An observant eye that reveals Jorge Tur Molto’s talent is overlaid with an account of the filmmaker’s relationship with his girlfriend, which coming to its end. A film that takes up the issue of distance, it is brilliant, full of humour and ends in a deliciously exceptional romantic finale.
(Catalogue of Visions du Réel, Nyon, Switzerland)
A Russian travelogue between Moscow and Saint Petersburg. While the camera takes in the life in the streets of the capital, it also probes into the filmmaker’s dying relationship with his girlfriend, capturing their everyday intimacy. Jorge Tur Moltó goes beyond impressionism, finding images that seem to make the past reappear between the cracks of a seemingly trivial present. A troop of soldiers marching against the background of expensive cars. Lenin and Stalin chatting as they wait for the tourists. In Saint Petersburg, where his partner is no longer with him, the film becomes elegiac. Birds swim, dance on the half frozen river to the sound of the bells from an orthodox church. Without dialogue, rhythmed by a few insert titles, Diario ruso unpretentiously unfolds its somewhat novelistic narrative. Combining both the particular and the universal, Jorge Tur Moltó uses the diary genre to express the power of cinema when it melts the subject into the sorrounding world, when the Self dissolves into the Other.
(Carlo Chatrian)
