Great Poetry

Great Poetry is about two guys who live on the outskirts of Moscow and work as cash collectors. They're young, lonely, and all they have in the world is each other. They spend their lives moving money for other people. Dreaming, they attend a poetry class at their local cultural center, and watch cock fights at a dorm for migrant workers. Attempts to find poetry in the prosaic world that surrounds them lead the heroes to the conclusion that the only poetic move they can make is to rob a bank. Paul Claudel wrote that a person lives their life intimately and poetically, and in our film there is a lot of poetry. But the film isn't about words or rhymes. It's about friendship and betrayal, and about our vicious and alien world in which anyone who tries to be honest and consistent ends up looking naive and cruel. It's about the ever-present and incomprehensible force that no matter what makes our life so frantic, strange, and lonely. —Alexander Lungin