Interpretation of Dreams

The Freudian feature documentary Interpretation of Dreams, produced during perestroika, introduced for the first time the world of Freud’s ideas to audiences in the former Soviet Union, since his works were banned by Communist censorship. The film juxtaposed a dialog between the filmmaker and the patriarch himself and the history of the Soviet Union and Europe.

Festivals & Awards

DocuDays, Andrei Zagdansky retrospective
Kiev, Ukraine 2014
"Dali & Beyond" Film Series,
Salvador Dali Museum
Saint Petersburg, Florida 2009
Film Series "Ver Sin Vertov" (Without Vertov)
LA Casa Encendida, Madrid 2005
"Glasnost" Film Series for The Film Society
at Lincoln Center
New York, 1997
Film Forum, Limited Release
New York, 1992
San Francisco Jewish Film Festival
1991
London Jewish Film Festival
1991
New York Jewish Film Festival
1991
Krakow International Film Festival
1991
New Directors/New Films Series
Museum of Modern Art, New York 1991
IDFA, Opening Night
Amsterdam, 1990
Robert Flaherty International Film Seminar
1990 and 1991
Grand Prix All-Union Documentary Film Festival Voronezh, USSR 1990

Press

"Interesting" and "provocative"
Vincent Canby, The New York Times
more

"A strange and superb film"
Matthew Flamm, New York Post

"Astonishing marriage of Freudian thinking and history”
Boston Globe

"A truly magical and extraordinary film…"
Cinema Independent, London.

"A film for intellectuals, packed with consequential ideas"
Leah Garchik, San Francisco Chronicle.

BLOGOSPHERE:

"The Soviet Union’s collapse, and the turmoil, and the mental and moral disarray, that ensued in the region, initially led to a spate of (mostly pedophilic) pornographic films and, worse, hateful, reactionary, proto-tsarist assaults, nearly all of them strident, coarse and incompetently made. Preferable are honest, serious films that address aspects of the Soviet regime, or Soviet society and daily life, in an analytical rather than an attack mode. One of these is Andrei Zagdansky’s documentary The Interpretation of Dreams (1990) which, in a stream of haunting images both archival and new, celebrates the dissolution of the Soviet ban on Sigmund Freud’s writings. Now that Russians can freely access what are possibly the most essential documents for understanding the twentieth century, they can record their own fresh discovery of these works, perhaps most pertinently Totem and Taboo, and apply it to Soviet history. This in fact is what Zagdansky has done. The unspoken irony throughout this highly imaginative film is the deficit of perspective and insight that the ban on Freud enforced on the Soviet Union".
Dennis Grunes. WorldPress.com

Credits

Directed by Andrei Zagdansky
Narrator Sergei Yursky
Story Editor Yuri Makarov
Cameraman Vladimir Guyevsky
Editor Olga Gubskaya
Music Supervisor
Yulia Lazarevskaya
52 Minutes
A co-production of Film Studio "Thursday", Ukraine and ORF, Austria
© 1989 Film Studio "Thursday"