BLR, DE 1992 | Director: Jurij Chascewatskij | Screenplay: Ella Milova, Irina Pismennaja | Camera: Semjon Friedland | Editing: Vera Antipowa | Sound: Grigori Komel, Wassilij Schitikow | Assistant director: Bronislawa Loban, Marina Pawlowa | Production Manager: Michaeil Schinkewitsch, Hildegard Westbeld | Editor: Barbara Denz | Production: Tatjana Studio Minsk, ABC-Studio, Bremer Institut Film/Fernsehen Produktionsgesellschaft mbH (BIFF, Bremen) | Colour + b/w | DCP | 74 min | russian OV with german & english SUB | FSK 12 | Stiftung Deutsche Kinemathek

Behind the prosaic film title lies a brilliantly instructive work. The film was conceived and shot in 1990/91 in the declining USSR, in Belarus, Russia, Siberia, Tajikistan and Lithuania, "to help us understand what is happening to us," according to screenwriters and Studio Tatyana frontwomen Ella Milova and Irina Pismennaja. It's a film letter from the perspective of Homo Sovieticus – but in the feminine plural, addressed to Helke Sander and other "Western feminists" (the co-production was also shot in West Germany with the Bremen Institute for Film & Television). We see encounters with imprisoned women trapped with their children near Chernobyl; Tajik cotton pickers who tell of colonial exploitation; mothers of soldiers whose sons were killed in the army; women in slaughterhouses; party officials. The high-visibility vests that give the film its title are a symbol of the hard labour performed by women in the Soviet empire. The film explores issues of equality and democratisation, as well as the possibility of love. More than 30 years later, the unconscionable, unresolved issues that ORANGE VESTS addresses are shockingly relevant in our Putin & Co. present: hauntology. (Gaby Babić)

We will screen a new digitalisation of the German version of a 35mm copy from the Salzgeber Filmverleih collection. The slightly longer English cinema version is currently thought to be lost.

Content Notes