Cinema Club Film Screening: The Needle

Directed by Rashid Nugmanov (Kazakhstan, 1988)
In the bleak filmscape of glasnost, The Needle stood out as a black sheep of a movie. The most playful and offbeat of the Soviet films of the period, it contrasted sharply to the mainstream, which was overwhelmed with revisionism of the Stalinist past and nihilistic social criticism.

A young man named Moro (played by Viktor Tsoi, the late rock ‘n’ roll legend from the St. Petersburg band “Kino”) returns to his Asiatic hometown only to find his exgirlfriend, Dina (Marina Smirnova), becoming a drug addict and himself becoming involved in the bizarre life of the city’s underworld. In an attempt to save Dina, Moro takes her away to the Aral Sea, turned into a barren desert by the time they arrive. There Dina seems cured, but back in town everything starts anew. Almost desperate, Moro decides to fight the drug dealers, led by a hospital doctor (played by another rock ‘n’ roll star, eccentric leader of the “Sound of Mu” band and the future star of Taxi Blues , Pyotr Mamonov), when one of them stabs him in a deserted park.