A Russian Youth

A young Russian boy blinded in World War One remains on the frontline by listening for enemy planes through giant metal funnels in this sensorial film that merges music and cinema.

Aleksey is a naïve country boy with dreams of glory who joins the Russian army only to be seriously injured in a gas attack by the Germans. Blinded and yet refusing to return home, he is deployed with a specially constructed device that uses oversized pipes as hearing aids to listen for danger. In an ode to Soviet melodramas, the footage is grainy and sepia-tinted, accompanied by a unique soundtrack of orchestral works by Sergei Rachmaninoff, one of the greatest of the Russian Romantic composers.