The Village Detective: A Song Cycle

A Soviet film from 1969 is found in an Icelandic fisherman's net, and the filmography of its leading actor offers a portal into forgotten histories that endure on celluloid.

In July 2016, four reels of "Derevenskiy Detektiv" (directed by Ivan Lukinsky USSR, 1969), a Soviet film starring celebrity actor Mikhail Zharov (1899-1981), were found in a fisherman's net trawling the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean, 20 miles off the Icelandic coast. In this layered documentary hybrid, the recovered footage is interwoven with interviews and clips from Zharov's lengthy filmography to reflect the ways in which life and art can intersect, and how history can endure, and resurface transformed, on celluloid.