Cinema: A Public Affair

“A film begins when it ends. It begins in the conversation and exchange of opinions about it. That’s when the dream of what we’ve just seen crystallizes into reality. And in this process, we become better people, a little more free and open,” Naum Kleiman, an acclaimed film historian and Eisenstein expert, observes in this collage portrait of his twenty-five years as director of the vibrant, idealistic, but beleaguered “Musey Kino,” Moscow’s Cinema Museum. He was forced out in 2014—in part, one suspects, because of his unshakable belief that cinema is a social and cultural necessity for a free nation.