The dimly lit, rain-soaked cinemas of 1980s Soviet life provided brief but significant havens. Among the films, Sergei Tarasov’s 1985 Чернaя стрела (The Black Arrow) stood out not only as entertainment but also as an event—an artefact of a society struggling with its paradoxes. Under the heavy shadow of a collapsing Soviet ideology, this rendition of Robert Louis Stevenson’s story connected as both metaphor and adventure, a revolt against the ordinary disguised as historical epic.
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