Konchalovsky's greatest film was banned for more than twenty years for daring to tell the truth about the Russian peasantry-mired in mud, alcohol, inefficiency, and neglect. Gorbachev himself screened Asya's Happiness in 1987 to authorize its release, calling it one of the best films he had seen in ten years. The film celebrates the endurance and spiritual strength of Asya, a crippled farm girl who is cruelly abused by the boy she loves and who lives through a terrible personal ordeal utterly alone and in typical rural poverty. The great actress Iya Savina gives a luminous, heart-stopping performance as Asya. Most of the other performers are non-professionals-gnarled, prematurely aged, tattooed, fingers missing, haunted by memories of the gulag-who proved embarrassing to the authorities in 1966. How could a hunchback play a collective farm chairman? (In fact, the hunchback actor was in real life a collective farm chairman!) There are moments of beauty and revelation in Asya's Happiness that could only come from real people struggling in harsh circumstances to keep alive a sense of humanity, humor, and justice.-Tom Luddy, San Francisco International Film Festival '88