What Beat You Nothing (2021)

Alla Demidova ranks among the greatest actresses to have graced the Russian-language stage over the past six decades, as well as screens big and small. She's famous for her tragic characters. Perhaps because she, above all, understands the world as a realm of worries and sorrow? Maybe this is what intrigued Ljubov Arkus - arguably the most outstanding figure in modern Russian critical film culture - about her in the first place. That as a result of this mentality, something about the final decades of the USSR as well as the new Russia crystallises in her, making Demidova the perfect focal point for a meditation on several separate questions, sketches of other creative geniuses, all of them crisscrossing through her life and career. All of which makes WHAT BEAT YOU NOTHING a most unusual undertaking, for it is not only a classical portrait of an artist, but an essay, a series of thoughts and observations that take Demidova as a starting point and finishing line.