Travelling with Pets

Director: Vera Storozheva
Cast: Kseniya Kutepova, Dmitriy Dyuzhev, Evgeniy Knyazev
Russia, 2007, 97’, color
Russian with Turkish subtitles

A predominantly visual film of few words, Traveling with Pets opens simultaneously with a death and a birth: Natalia's husband, to whom she was sold by an orphanage at the age of sixteen, falls dead while selling milk to a passing train. It is at this moment that Natalia finds herself alone and free, an independent agent for the first time in her life. She begins building a new future for herself with small steps: first by redecorating her apartment—by torching her husband's possessions and adorning the one-room shack with a mirror, a flat-screen television, clippings of Western celebrities from pop-culture magazines. Former actress Vera Storozheva (a frequent collaborator with famed filmmaker Kira Muratova) shows considerable skill as director, echoing Natalia’s awakening in a soundtrack that leaves the creaks and disordered noises of a mechanical environment for a more harmonious and natural one, and in cinematographer Oleg Lukichev’s remarkable images, whose drab winter grays give way to a vibrant springtime palette. But it’s Kutepova as Natalia who truly puts the spark in this invigorating example of feminist cinema.