A Film About Anna Akhmatova is an important happening for me, for all of us.
– Mikhail Baryshnikov
One of Russia’s greatest poets
A survivor of fame and terror
By age twenty-five, fate had granted Anna Akhmatova every conceivable gift—poetic talent, strength of character, beauty, and fame amidst a brilliant generation. She was then inundated with the tragedies of her century: the arrests and executions of her loved ones, starvation, hardships, wars and revolutions, the Soviet regime’s destruction of the culture itself and almost everyone who was part of it, persecution and civic death, isolation, betrayal. Yet Akhmatova emerged victorious, armed with mere conscience and words of poetry that were for many years too dangerous even to commit to paper, surviving only as memorized by a few close friends.
That victory is the core of the film. But A Film About Anna Akhmatova is not a simple “bio pic.” Rather, it is a live process of recreating a story akin to ancient tragedy. Before the viewer’s eyes it emerges from archival and modern footage, unique sound recordings of Akhmatova’s voice, her poems and photographs, and the many paintings and portraits of her, with the commentary of the poet Anatoly Naiman, who knew Akhmatova in her last years.
