Released for the first time on home video, Mark Levinson's PRISONER OF TIME (1993) is a fastball thrown beyond indiewood's radar. Starring the renowned Russian actress Yelena Koreneva (reminiscent here of a Russian Isabelle Huppert) as a former dissident author caught in a post-glasnost netherworld trance, PRISONER takes none. With its inky blacks and reds and murky early Nineties savor, the film bleeds into the pool of the art it plays up.- Jordan Mattos
When the iron curtain finally fell, all of Europe braced itself for the crash. Years later, Chrystina can still hear the echoes...Ten years after her last book was published, Chrystina Marr (Koreneva), a dissident author during the coldest period of Soviet oppression, travels to America to accept an award for her daring literature. There she reunites with Alexander Jadov, an old flame who escaped to America. Alexander is a smoldering soldier of the resistance, an artist still dealing in the wares of revolution. Now Chrystina must face Alexander and the past he represents: the fight she abandoned so many years ago. The film's rich, assorted palette guides us from the shroud of Chrystina's past to the gentle sunlight still glimmering on her horizon.
