Certificate 12A. Running time: 2 hour 7 mins. Biography, Drama. Doors open at 7pm
The film’s title derives from the Russian phrase “belaya vorona”, or “white crow”, meaning an outsider or nonconformist. The “white crow” of this film is the Russian ballet dancer Rudolf Nureyev, a man who had difficulty conforming to the official Soviet system, either in his artistic or personal life.
Nureyev shocked the world of ballet when he defected to the West at Le Bourget airport, Paris, in 1961, and the film is built around this incident. His decision to defect was, apparently, a spontaneous one, taken when the Communist authorities, irritated by the fact that he had spent much of his time in Paris in the company of Western intellectuals and concerned by rumours that he had been seen in a gay bar, decided to send him back to Russia rather than allowing him to travel with the Kirov ballet on to London. Scenes of Nureyev’s stay in Paris are intercut with flashbacks to his poverty-stricken wartime childhood and to his time as a ballet student in Leningrad, (then known as St Petersburg).
Written by David Hare and Directed by Ralph Fiennes’ THE WHITE CROW was inspired by the book Rudolf Nureyev: The Life by Julie Kavanaugh. The drama charts the iconic dancer’s famed defection from the Soviet Union to the West in 1961, despite KGB efforts to stop him.