ABSTRACT
It seems that nobody except us doubts that we have a remarkable cinema. In our country there is a great deal of naive respect for films from the West. People who eagerly await every film from the West and really only watch our own films with condescension are mistaken. Western audiences, for their part, only watch most of these Western films with condescension and, likewise, they eagerly await our films. Our cinema is in no way to blame. The nervousness, peevishness and haughtiness of our critics, convulsively praising and then inducing panic and screaming 'crisis', bear witness only to their own crisis and nothing more. From everyone of our films the critics demand, at the very least, the touch of genius, forgetting that genius is on the whole rarely to be found.
