Oscar Rabin wanted to paint. In the Soviet Union that made him a dissident.

In 1974 Rabin helped organize an open-air show of unofficial art in Moscow. The authorities broke it up with bulldozers and water cannons. Images of the attack went around the world, and within weeks officials had to allow a second outdoor show. Thousands came. Several years later Rabin and his wife, the painter Valentina Kropivnitskaya, were forced into exile, and he was stripped of his Soviet citizenship. They started over in France.

A Road of Many Colors tells their story in two documentaries written and directed by Alexander Smoljanski and Evgeny Tsymbal. In Search of a Lost Paradise (2015, 52 minutes) follows the life and art of Kropivnitskaya. Oscar (2018, 90 minutes) turns to Rabin. It draws on archival footage, some of it shown publicly for the first time, and on conversations with artists and writers including Ilya Kabakov, Vitaly Komar, Eric Bulatov, Lyudmila Ulitskaya, Vladimir Sorokin, and Vladimir Paperny. Rabin died in 2018 at 90, shortly after the Paris premiere of Oscar.

The films ask what art can do when power demands obedience, a question artists, writers, and cultural institutions face again today.

Alexander Smoljanski joins us for a conversation after the screening. Smoljanski is a writer, director, and producer who conceived A Road of Many Colors and made both films with Evgeny Tsymbal.

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