Gennadi Shpalikov was a talented screenwriter whose ten scripts profoundly influenced the shape of 1960s Russian filmmaking (the generation that included Larissa Shepitko and Kira Muratova, as well as Tarkovsky, Iosseliani, and Konchalovsky). "An incarnation of the heart and soul of the sixties, he discovered a new way of seeing cities and people. He was the search, incarnate, for knowledge, love, friends...new dramatic forms, always more open, always more personal." (Mark-Paul Meyer, Rotterdam) A Long Happy Life was the only film he directed and is a masterpiece of his style, which stressed "little points of interruption" and "purely visual feelings," in his words. It tells of a young man and woman who meet on a bus, attempt to take in a play (The Cherry Orchard, whose dialogues invade the film), and part to an unexpected future. Shpalikov was soon to be faced with the devastating cultural repression of the Brezhnev years, and in 1975 hanged himself.