The Mamleev family portrait, set in the cramped interior of a small Moscow flat, is an experiment in metaphysical documentary making. Yury Mamleev, the great writer of the Russian chthonic, plays with a cat while his wife, the translator Maria Mamleeva, flips through a photo album from their émigré years in Paris and America. But something eerie seeps into these scenes of simple comfort, vaguely manifesting itself in the elliptical editing and the soundtrack’s unsettling, abstract humming.

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