Wednesday September 21st 2011
Belarus 2009   120 minutes
Director: Radu Mihaileanu
Starring: Aleksei Guskov, Melanie Laurent, Dmitri Nazarov.

The new season starts with a French-Russian comedy. Andrey Simonovich Filipov was fired for hiring "politically unsure" artistes thirty years ago from his position as conductor of the Bolshoi orchestra, and now works as an office cleaner. Coming across a fax message from the Chatelet theatre in Paris, he hijacks an invitation for the Bolshoi to perform there and sets about replacing the orchestra with his old colleagues and friends. The resulting chaotic trip to Paris, and the attempts to engage the prominent French violinist Anne-Marie Jacquet to star in a performance of Tchaikovsky’s Violin Concerto, make for a thoroughly enjoyable and entertaining film.