Film Restoration

The Village Detective: a song cycle tells of a mysterious canister of 35mm movie film rescued from the ocean floor by the crew of an Icelandic fishing vessel.  The decades-submerged celluloid within proved to be four reels of a 1969 Soviet crime-comedy called The Village Detective (Derevensky detektiv).  Having been down there for years, the film itself had taken on all kinds of peculiar chemical degradations.  Although The Village Detective, directed by Ivan Lukinsky, is not considered any kind of rare or lost film, the physical damage to this print puts its discovery right in the wheelhouse of experimental documentarian Bill Morrison.