Long Goodbye, a little-known masterpiece by Ukrainian filmmaker Kira Muratova, is the tender story of a mother’s overbearing love for her son and his attempts to escape her stifling embrace. The inability of mother and son to communicate and the mother’s increasingly hysterical struggle for emotional dignity so outraged the censors on its release, that like many others of Kira Muratova’s films, it was banned. One of the most celebrated re-discoveries of the glasnost era, the film boasts an exquisitely theatrical performance by Zinaida Sharko as the divorced mother counter-pointed by the natural performance of non-professional Oleg Vladimirsky, for whom this was his only film role.
