Evacuation and The Last Train: Cinematic Parallel Tracks
I’ve always felt emotionally drawn to Russian art and literature. My connection with Russian cinema began at Odeon Cinema in downtown Cairo, once dedicated to films from the Soviet Union. Over the years, my admiration grew as I followed the works of great directors like Andrei Tarkovsky—creator of Solaris and Ivan’s Childhood—and Nikita Mikhalkov, director of the masterpiece The Barber of Siberia.
This attachment pulled me toward Evacuation (Evacuatciya), which focuses on the relocation of civilians from Soviet regions threatened by Nazi invasion to the eastern parts of the country. At the time, Kazakhstan received around 1.5 million people, many of whose families still live there today.
The film follows Natalia and her daughter Galia, who travel east with the refugees. Amidst the chaos at a train station, Natalia loses her daughter and goes searching for her in Almaty, a city overcrowded with evacuees.
World War II occupies a large space in both classic and modern cinema. I remember serving on the FIPRESCI jury at the Thessaloniki Film Festival, where we awarded our prize to the The Last Train (Posledniy poezd, 2003) by Aleksei German Jr., which also won the festival’s grand prize.
The Last Train tells the story of an overweight middle-aged man wearing a German officer’s uniform who gets off a train somewhere in Russia in winter. We eventually learn he is a doctor who has just been summoned. It is the end of the line—the Germans are about to retreat. He goes to a hospital being evacuated, gets expelled, then wanders with another recruit—a failed actor turned postman—who later goes deaf after a shell explosion. Along the way, they encounter their Russian counterparts, equally brutal, while the war rages around them.
I watched the film back in Thessaloniki in 2003. German Jr. won the Golden Alexander Award that year, and also the FIPRESCI Prize, for portraying—with uncompromising honesty, remarkable mise-en-scène, and meticulous vision—the horrors of war where no one truly wins. I wrote about it then under the title: “The Last Train and the War No One Wins.”
Watching Evacuation those memories returned. The new film centers on ordinary people facing the terrors of war, holding on to love against all odds. I felt it was a tribute to the 2003 Russian film.
Both The Last Train and Evacuation share similar qualities:
– journeys marked by hardship
– encounters at train stations filled with human stories
– black-and-white cinematography
– the 4:3 frame ratio typical of that era
– a style reminiscent of socialist realism
Director Farkhat Sharipov, born in 1983 in Almaty, Kazakhstan, graduated in 2007 from the Kazakh National Academy of Arts. In 2008, he trained at the New York Film Academy. His debut feature, The Tale of a Pink Rabbit (2009), was a major success in Kazakhstan. He later directed seven more films, some of which gained international festival acclaim. He currently lives and works in Almaty, is married, and has two children.
Sharipov produced and edited Evacuation, employing a Russian actress alongside Kazakh actors. His work shows clear influence from the Russian school of filmmaking—mastering large group scenes, period-correct costumes and props, and expressive frames blending realism with romantic revolutionary spirit.
I found an article among my papers about the film The Suit, which won the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival in 2003. It was the same year as The Last Train, and it opened a week of contemporary Russian cinema organized jointly by the Russian Ministry of Culture and the Egyptian Ministry of Foreign Cultural Relations. At the conference, Bakhtiyar Nazarov, the director of The Suit, spoke about how young filmmakers resorted to co-productions to compensate for the generous government support that the Soviet state had previously provided. The Suit tells the story of three young friends in the context of the new Russia, exploring their relationship as marginalized and oppressed individuals with the rising bourgeoisie. They are united by their dream of acquiring a “stylish suit” as their gateway into the world of the rising class in contemporary Russia.
The Suit bears the hallmarks of Russian cinema, relying on symbolism and blending realism with poetry. The film’s scenes reveal the influence of the great director Bardjanov, the master of The Fiery Horses, and the films of the poet of Russian cinema, Tarkovsky, particularly his most famous works, Andrei Rublev and Mirror. This influence is combined with a contemporary vision and a fast-paced rhythm, in which the director accompanies his characters on their small adventures, their thefts, and their attempts to make a living despite their complicated family circumstances. The Suit, a Russian-French-German-Italian co-production, runs for one hundred minutes and is based on a screenplay by Smirtov. It is the seventh film by its director, a graduate of the VGIK Film Institute in Moscow, who also studied with a number of Egyptian and Syrian filmmakers, including the Egyptian Mohamed Kamel El-Qalyoubi and the Syrians Osama Mohamed and Mohamed Malas.
Safaa El Laisy Haggag
Edited by Robert Horton
© FIPRESCI 2025