When Alfonso Cuarón asked me if I wanted to make a short film about Christmas celebrations, I immediately thought of a big pink cake: the cake was on a table, and lots of pupils were staring at it, enthralled. That image derived from my memories of a little story that I had read many years previously: it was in a letter that the writer Elsa Morante sent to her friend Goffredo Fofi to wish him a happy Christmas. Her splendid letter described the fortunes of a zuppa inglese, a cake like a trifle, that had ended up in a religious boarding school during the festive season. It was while I was imagining paths crossing in the boarding school, with Christmas approaching in the thoughts and actions of the orphan girls left alone there with four nuns in a time of scarcity and war, that the film was born. It’s a film about desires, pure and selfish, about freedom and devotion, about the anarchy that is capable of flowering in the minds of the girls within the confines of the strict boarding school. Though the obedient students may not be able to move, but in their eyes, their pupils can dance the unrestrained dance of freedom.

Alice Rorhwacher

Korotkie vstrechi was only one of several films made in 1966-1967, at the very end of the Khrushchev-inspired Thaw, featuring capable,unmarried heroines… who struggle with conflicts between the demands of their profession and those of love, family or – in the wider sense –of humanity, going far beyond the Stalin-era stereotypes of Soviet womanhood: either Cinderella or all-capable Amazon… Nadia, a village girl working as a waitress in a roadside cafe, falls in love with the guitar-playing Maxim and tracks down his address in the city. It turns out to be the apartment of Valentina, a member of the city soviet in charge of water and sewage. She assumes the girl at her door has beensent to work as a live-in housekeeper; Nadia, not revealing her friendship with Maxim, accepts the job… Vladimir Gulchenko has observed that the plot is less a love triangle than two parallel story lines that meet somewhere beyond the frame of the film. In fact, this reflects thegenesis of the screenplay, which Kira Muratova wrote in collaboration with Leonid Zhukhovitsky… The Nadia/Maxim plot line came from Zhukhovitsky’s short story, The House in the Steppe… But Muratova’s Nadia, in Ruslanova’s interpretation, is a far more interestingcharacter than Zhukhovitsky’s skinny, pale-browed 17-year-old. She is a self-contained young woman with deep roots in her native village.In the finished film, the most interesting and fully developed relationship is that between the two women, rather than between either of them and Maxim. Of his collaboration with Muratova, Zhukhovitsky recalls, “My story was a man’s story; it became clear that Kira wanted to make a woman’s film.

Jane Taubman, Kira Muratova, IB Tauris, New York 2005