THE LEFT HANDER Directed by Yury Kuzin St Petersburg Reissue 1999- 2024

Ladies and Gentlemen! Here is the anniversary re-release of the short film “Left-hander“ about Hitler’s childhood years in Linz, Austria, 1999/2024. In addition to important changes in editing, sound, credits, I took upon myself a truly “Sisyphean labour“ - to cut off the highlights on the tips of all the frames, which were not removed from the negative by the VGIK editors back in 1999. The previous monstrous copy of the film was digitised from a VHS tape. I replaced the 3/4 format as archaic with a 16:9 “screen mush“. All children are angels. But some, when they grow up, become “terrible parents“ whose sons will not miss an opportunity to drink blood from the mother of their children. I made a sketch about humiliation and insults, which hurt, but also give fantasy. A child is beaten! For what? And why does God fail to act? Hitler interested me, but least of all psychoanalysis, which viewed the dictator’s destructiveness from the angle of the Oedipus complex. I decided to investigate the obstruction of the marginalised, and to put an end to speculation about the nature of evil with the drama of left-handed children. I took up the defence of genes whose breakdowns supposedly lead to hard-heartedness. My film didn’t absolve the maniac of guilt, but it didn’t allow liberals to flash their heels either. Besides, I shunned the beaten track and the autobahn of Fritz Dietz, the paving stones of Kukryniksy preferred the narrow gauge railway with rumbling express trains, the wheels of which would make silverware dance in Clara Hitler’s kitchen cupboard. There was also the Chaplin way. But I dismissed it, seeing laughter as a bearish favour to the tyrant. What if we don’t stigmatise evil, but listen? What if the devil is laid on the couch - isn’t that what Freud, Jung, Adler and Karen Horney did? Wouldn’t Lucifer, having blown off steam, lay his cards on the table? The painting was expected. But the appearance of the ogoltsy surprised even the hardened critics. The idea that monsters have childhoods too, it was shocking. Of course, happy growing up with slightly burnt cakes, a papier-mâché paradise, a mahogany crucifix and Shrovetide festivities in colourful carnival costumes will not make the viewer cry. But the more convincingly Addy suffered from the leather crag with which the customs officer Alois strapped his left arm to his son’s thigh, the more difficult it was for the audience to demonise Hitler. The villain was being humanised! The attack only sharpened its claws... At the beginning of the film, clutching a pencil in his left hand, the first-grader writes “Adolf Schicklgruber“ in Sütterlin script (German Gothic italics), but in the final scene, with the fingers of his plastered right hand, he writes “Adolf Hitler“. Before that, Addy had blown his father’s office to smithereens and fallen on the rubble, in which the future ruins of cities were vaguely guessed. Father a tyrant, mother a slave, teacher a sociopath - what a breeding ground for the birth of a monster. 1999/2024. 19 min. Sepia. Evgeny Kindinov as Aloysius, - the father of Adi...