Barcud Derwen

A documentary about H.H. Holmes who was a famed serial killer in the late 1800s. He had a whole murder castle built specifically for that purpose. He spent nearly a decade hiring and firing builders to add pieces to his house that included pipes for pumping gas into bedrooms, a room built specifically to suffocate people, and a murder basement where he would strip the skin from his victims.

Through her very real subject Edgar Figner, director Nathalie Alonso Casale offers us an intimate sense of the 21st-century Russian zeitgeist. A true alchemist, Mr. Figner has spent his life in Leningrad (St. Petersburg) as a sound-effects artist at Lenfilm Studios, where from the silent era to the present he has used commonplace objects (cabbages, old shoes) to create complex sound effects for films. Under the pressures of contemporary Russian life, Figner begins to retreat into a past comprising his own personal history and the history of Russian cinema. As reality and memory blend with stunning scenes from Soviet films, Figner’s art becomes a soundtrack for the muffled culture created by the repression of the Soviet era. This delicate mix of documentary, reality and cinematic imagination creates a deeply sensitive account of the silences at the heart of the Russian social, political and cinematic experience.