UDSSR 1978 | Director: Kira Muratova | Script: Kira Muratova, Grigori Baklanov | Camera: Yuri Klimenko | Music: Valentin Silvestrov | Cast: Viktor Aristov, Sergey Popov, Vladimir Pozhidayev, Aleksey Zharkov, Ludmila Gurchenko, Natalia Leble, Nina Ruslanova | Colour | DCP of 35mm | 79 min | russ. OV with english SUB | Oleksandr Dovzhenko National Centre

A love triangle at an eternally unfinished major construction site, ironically distorted, cheekily playful, artificial and stagey. Tender at first, then carnivalesque. Ljuba is a cleaner; Nikolaj and Mischa are drivers; tractors and cement mixers rumble among puddles and scaffolding. This is a place of desire and suffering, recitation and despair; work is carried out on the side. Kira Muratova's early female figures are all in the midst of working lives – which is completely natural. It is important to emphasise this in view of the fact that her body of filmmaking, set against the backdrop of socialist realism, was praised as radically subverse Soviet cinema and labeled a new genre of everyday melodrama. One might claim that in this, her third independent film as a director following BRIEF ENCOUNTERS and THE LONG FAREWELL, it becomes very clear how the private and the public, the intimate and the communal, not only mirror but entangle libido and production – into a veritable labour of love that betrays neither one's Self nor the Other, and most certainly not the others. Kira once called it "my favourite film. It is constructed not by overcoming but by demonstrating material surface conditions. The chaos may seem ugly to some people. It seems beautiful to me. It has no style, but also no possibility of being stylised. In GETTING TO KNOW THE BIG, WIDE WORLD, everything is nascent..." (Barbara Wurm)