Room and a Half

2009 Director Andrei Khrzhanovsky

This touching and amusing movie is a biography, both imaginative and imaginary, of Joseph Brodsky (1940-1996), the self-taught poet, critic and translator, raised in Leningrad, the son of a Soviet naval photographer, and persecuted by the state for his independence of mind.

In 1972 he was driven into American exile where he achieved intellectual eminence, and he received the Nobel Prize for literature in 1987.

Brodsky never returned to Russia and apparently once said that "such a journey could only take place anonymously". Khrzhanovsky takes Brodsky on a journey back to Leningrad, dreaming about his youth, upbringing and early life as he takes the ferry from Helsinki to Leningrad before being reunited with his elderly parents.

The director uses animated sequences to elegant effect, and his affectionate, nostalgic movie brings to mind the autobiographical works of those other exiles, Vladimir Nabokov and Andrei Tarkovsky.