The Postman's White Nights


The Postman's White Nights is a 2014 Russian drama film directed by Andrei Konchalovsky. It tells the story of the people of a remote Russian village, whose main contact with the outside world is a postman. All actors in the film are non-professionals and casting took a year.
It was selected for the In Competition section at the 71st Venice International Film Festival and won the Silver Lion. In September 2014, director Konchalovsky withdrew the film from the list of films being considered for the Russian entry for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film. It was filmed at the Kenozersky National Park, Arkhangelsk Oblast, Russia.

Cast

The film was reviewed by Variety magazine, which said that likable protagonists and some stunning shots do not cover its weak spots. The film also got 83% on Metacritic and on Cine Vue who gave him four stars.
"The setting itself is gorgeous, with its boxy cottages fringed by grassy clearings and woodlands, and the placid surface of the water stretching on for miles. It's a rare pleasure to see a film made with such an elegant compositional eye Deep-focus shots of Lyokha at his most pensive, standing on the shores of the lake, are loaded with a sense of place, and of belonging. The same goes for the hypnotic Steadycam sequences of him zooming along in his boat, the sound of the motor quietly giving way to a slow build of electronica composer Eduard Artemyev's stirring ambient score with choral elements."

"'The Postman's White Nights' is being widely celebrated as a quasi-documentary, marked by a droll sense of humor that illuminates life in a forgotten corner of the world. And it is that, no doubt, but for us it went much further than mere anthropological interest. If it presents an accurate picture of this reality, then it feels like it's a reality that is unstable, so far cut off from the mainstream of life that it has begun to fray into the surreal and the magic at the edges."