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This what-if drama pivots on an imagined journey made by elderly real-life poet Joseph Brodsky (Grigoriy Dityatkovskiy) back to his Russian homeland, from which he was exiled in 1972.

Drawing on archival footage, surreal animated sequences and fictional re-enactments, Andrey Khrzhanovskiy makes an ambitious fist of his feature film debut, conjuring wistful, whimsical memories of Brodsky’s life in the USSR of the ’50s and ’60s, before he was denounced by the authorities for what they called ‘social parasitism’.

It’s an uneven and overextended film, but there’s a clearly a depth of personal feeling at its core.