Believe it or not, but the Baltimore Sun has a piece on the film The Turkish Gambit, which is based on Boris Akunin's widely successful novel of the same name:
One elderly woman who hadn't been to the theater in 25 years, he said, felt she had to see Turkish Gambit because "it's something that belongs to our country."
The Soviet cinema, propaganda-ridden as it was, was one of the proudest achievements of the USSR. Its artists were celebrated internationally, and its movie houses were generally packed. But by the late 1990s, with declining support from the government and borders open to Hollywood blockbusters, the industry seemed on life support.
Now many here see the success of Turkish Gambit, as well as last year's urban-gothic movie Night Watch, as signs that the Russian popular film may be recovering.
No one seems hungrier for that revival, perhaps, than Russia's struggling film artists. "There was a time when the Soviet Union was a cinema state," said Faiziyev, a native of the former Soviet state of Uzbekistan and a veteran of Russian television and film studios. "Instead of gold and oil, Russia had cinema and vodka. We had a tradition of going to the cinema. And many people miss this tradition."
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