A Place on Earth

Artur Aristakisian set out with his camera to record Moscow’s disinherited, opponents of the system, seeking the philosophical justification for and practical fulfilment of their beliefs. He spent 1995-96 with a hippie community documenting the inhabitant’s ideological reversals, moral dilemmas, spiritual crises and disillusionment. The total isolation of this bizarre community of men and women, children and animal, beggars and cripples is only disturbed by police raids and attacks by various assailants. But their fanatical faith in the attainability of absolute freedom through free love becomes unbearable for some individuals, including their main ideologist. The filmmaker depicts the shattered reality of the deepest human decline in all its starkest cruelty. At the same time, he gives all events a purely Russian spiritual dimension which resonates with the poetry and moral pathos of an evangelical message. (Karlovy Vary International Film Festival)