The Pencil

This screening took place on Wednesday, February 10, 2021 at 5:30 pmYukon Arts Centre

The Pencil (Prostoi Karandash) In-cinema tickets on sale January 7.

Antonina, a smart and forceful artist (the radiant Nadezhda Gorelova) finds herself teaching art at the local school in a northern town in the taiga, home to a massive pencil-making factory, so she can be near her husband who has been wrongfully imprisoned.

Resisting her husband's pleas to go home to Saint Petersburg and forget about him, Antonina is making inroads with some of her students. However, she is actively opposed by 12-year-old bully Misha, the younger brother of a local gangster, and, more surprisingly, by the town residents and even her fellow teachers. As things escalate, Antonina comes to realize she is up against a society broken to the core.

"Writer-director Natalya Nazarova counterpoints her biting critique of contemporary Russian society with the region’s luminous light and the faded beauty of its wooden buildings, structures that hint at better times in the past. And behind it all looms the forest and the huge factory that transforms the towering trees into the simple tool that an artist can use to express so much…" - Vancouver Intl Film Festival

In Russian with English subtitles

Content advisory: descriptions of graphic physical violence, mature themes