In the Soviet Union circa 1984, Captain Zhurov (Alexei Poluyan) is a corrupt policeman who lives with his alcoholic mother. When an opportunity to exercise his power comes along one night at a bootlegger's shack, it produces a horrifying series of events in which a local girl, Angelika (Agniya Kuznetsova), is left at his mercy. Alexei Balabanov (BROTHER) directs this caustic black comedy that was a hit in its native Russia.

DVD Features:

Region 0
NTSC
Keep Case
Widescreen - 1.85
Audio:
Dolby Digital - Russian
Subtitles - English

Distributor Notes: The title of Russian director Alexey Balabanov's twelfth film is a military term for the coffins transporting dead soldiers back home during the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan. The effects of that decade-long conflict provide a unifying theme for this highly controversial film that recalls the work of Gaspar Noe and Michael Haneke but with a distinctly Russian point-of-view. Cargo 200 begins in 1984 with the introduction of two brothers: a Soviet Army colonel, and the head of the Faculty of Scientific Communism at Leningrad University. The university professor travels to visit his mother in a remote town. When his car brakes down, he stops at a rural farmhouse occupied by a husband, wife and their Vietnamese farm hand. The professor engages in a philosophical argument about the existence of God with the family patriarch, whose heated criticisms of official atheism are fueled by Utopian dreams and vodka distilled in the family barn. Meanwhile, a young man and the daughter of a Soviet secretary of a regional party committee meet at a party. The couple decides to take a drive, and their destination is the rural farmhouse. Lurking in the shadows of the farmhouse is Zhurov, a character vaguely based on Russian serial killer Gennady Mikhasevich. Although Mikhasevich was simply a depraved lunatic, Balabanov presents Zhurov as an emblem of both human perversion and the manifest corruption of the Soviet government. Zhurov’s appearance signals a series of loathsome events that form the rest of the film's narrative. In a Wall Street Journal interview Balabanov spoke of Cargo 200 in the following terms: "I show what filth we lived in. Society was sick from 1917 onwards." In light of Balabanov's remarks, Cargo 200 might best be summarized as a grim epitaph for the death of the former Soviet Union.

Alexey Serebryakov: Actor
Leonid Gromov: Actor
Yuri Stepanov: Actor
Alexei Poluyan: Russian actor
Agniya Kuznetsova: Russian actress

Alaxey Balabanov: Russian Director, SOLDIER (1997)

Sergei Selyanov: Producer, THE CUCKOO (2003)

"Art house meets grind house in CARGO 200, Alexey Balabanov's morbidly compelling thriller set in the Soviet Union."
3.5 stars out of 5 -- "[T]he realism of the cinematography, the pull-no-punches style in the scenes that depict Russia's military as a disenfranchised bunch of thugs and the gumption to toss it into one pot all deliver a robust recipe."