The Pencil
When
Occurs on
Wednesday February 10 2021
Approximate running time: 1 hour and 33 minutes
Venue
Performance Notes
×
Following Yukon Government COVID guidelines, large sections of the YAC theatre will be blocked off to ensure safe social distancing, and you are not able to select your own seating, to maximize our restricted seating capacity. Masks are mandatory for all patrons. We are also only able to provide advance ticket sales for this performance. THERE WILL BE NO WALK UP / RUSH TICKETS AVAILABLE.
If you are sick or exhibiting any symptoms of COVID-19, please stay home. DO NOT attend the performance if you are ill.
The Pencil (Prostoi Karandash)
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
Dir. Natalya Nazarova, 2019, Russia, 93 min
Content advisory: descriptions of graphic physical violence, mature themes
If you are sick or exhibiting any symptoms of COVID-19, please stay home. DO NOT attend the performance if you are ill.
The Pencil (Prostoi Karandash)
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
Dir. Natalya Nazarova, 2019, Russia, 93 min
Content advisory: descriptions of graphic physical violence, mature themes