Online Video Guide

Even before being released Alexey Balabanov s new film Cargo 200 attracted much attention in the press. The critics unanimously acknowledge Cargo 200 as one of the most significant films of the year, and many consider it to be Russian director Alexey Balabanov s (Brother, Of Freaks And Men) best film yet. The title of Balabanov's twelfth film is a military term for the coffins transporting dead soldiers back home during the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan. The effects of that decade-long conflict provide a unifying theme for this highly controversial film that recalls the work of Gaspar Noe and Michael Haneke but with a distinctly Russian point-of-view. Cargo 200 begins in 1984 with the introduction of two brothers: a Soviet Army colonel, and the head of the Faculty of Scientific Communism at Leningrad University. The university professor travels to visit his mother in a remote town. When his car brakes down, he stops at a rural farmhouse occupied by a husband, wife and their Vietname