Moi drug Ivan Lapshin = My friend Ivan Lapshin

The film opens in the present day, in colour, and the narrator reminisces about his experiences as a nine-year old child living in a provincial Russian town. As the film converts to black and white, the young boy tells of the flat he shared with Ivan, a police chief whose main activity in the cold winter of 1935 was to track down a notorious gang of criminals, but who also finds time to make a clumsy attempt at romance with an actress and to take care of his best friend whose wife has died. A detailed portrait of daily life in a pre-purge Soviet Union, ‘My Friend Ivan Lapshin’ is the director’s autobiographical reminiscence on his childhood, based on the stories of his father. Although the film is framed by the innocent observations of a child, through suggestion the narrative hints at the horrors that would become the norm in Stalinist Russia.

Credits: Director, Alexei Gherman ; writer, Eduard Volodarsky ; photography, Valery Fedosov ; music, Arkady Gagulashvili ; editing, L. Semenovoi.
Cast: Nina Ruslanova, Alexei Zharkov, Andrei Boltnev, Andrei Mironov, Aleksei Zharkov, Z. Adamovich.