AFI FEST Los Angeles International Film Festival 2009

Eduardo Coutinho, Brazil’s premier documentary filmmaker, reaches new heights with this surprising, even mysterious account of the Galpão Theater Company in Belo Horizonte. Coutinho and his crew are invited to record the process as the troupe creates a new, emotionally charged production of Chekhov’s The Three Sisters. Stage director Enrique Diaz and his company treat Chekhov as if he were a living, contemporary playwright, and Coutinho participates in his own way in his discovery of the play’s meaning. As he achieved in his previous doc PLAYING, Coutinho traces the thin and fascinating line between the actual lives of the actors and the roles they take on, how one influences the other, and how performance bleeds into reality. Certainly one of the most distinctive works in recent Brazilian cinema, MOSCOW is a film that celebrates theater’s alchemical qualities.

–Robert Koehler