I remember watching a fair bit of Soviet cinema as a child. This was back in the late 1970s and 80s, when India and the USSR were bosom buddies. Soviet children’s literature filled our bookshelves and the occasional Soviet Film Festival meant that even before I turned 10, I’d already seen English-dubbed Russian cartoons. Later, when we got a TV, we saw several classics—Anna Karenina, War and Peace, and the like—on Doordarshan. Those, sadly (yes, literally sadly!) left me with a lasting impression of Soviet Cinema = Moroseness, Morbidity, Unrelenting Angst.

It struck me the other day that that couldn’t be all. So I set out to see what I could unearth, and I discovered several films that I liked a lot. Devchata (The Girls) is one of them.

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