Stalin Thought of You

Over the course of his long career, Boris Efimov drew political cartoons about pretty much every important world event. He spent his entire career at periodicals and newspapers such as Pravda, meaning that for many years he drew under the most exacting, watchful eye of Stalin. In this film made just before his death in 2008 at the age of 108, Efimov explains in one of the many conversations with the director Kevin McNeer that his feelings about the dictator are ambivalent. The cartoonist's brother, a renowned journalist adulated by Hemingway, was executed by Stalin, causing in Efimov a trauma he would never fully recover from. Nonetheless, he also says that he has Stalin to thank for his life and career: at that time, it was standard practice to arrest the entire family of a suspect, so he might easily have suffered the same fate as his brother. He was saved because Stalin was a fan of his political cartoons, many of which are interspersed throughout this documentary. Efimov manages to come up with one astonishing story after the other, all ultimately pointing to the fact that under Stalin, loyalty always trumped freedom of expression. (International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam)