Flights in Dreams and in Reality / Poloty uvi sni ta naiavu
1983
Ukrainian SSR
Oleksandr Dovzhenko Film Studio
97 min
Roman Balaian
Viktor Merezhko
Vilen Kaliuta
Oleg Yankovskii, Liudmila Gurchenko, Oleg Tabakov, Liudmila Ivanova, Liudmila Zorina, Yelena Kostina, Oleg Menshykov, Liubov Rudneva, Aleksandr Adabashian, Nikita Mikhalkov, Yelena Cherniak, Aliona Odinokova, Serhii Ivanov
On the eve of his fortieth anniversary, an average Soviet engineer Sergei Makarov looks back at his life and realizes that he has achieved nothing. There was no happiness in his life and he wasn’t able to bring happiness to his dearest people: neither to his long-suffering wife, nor to his young mistress, nor to his friends.
Flights in Dreams and Reality is an exciting story about a man who never grew up and couldn’t find his way at times of social stagnation. Roman Balayan chose a gifted, charming, but infantile, lost and weak man as an anti-hero and a symbol of his non-heroic times, which got Oleg Yankovskyi the USSR State Prize for the male lead. The midlife crisis in Flights in Dreams and Reality is duplicated by the crisis in society so that it creates a strong story, intimate and epic at the same time.
The film was released in 1982 and became a real hit of the early Perestroika era, attracting an audience of 6.5 million people during the next year.