Continuing our journey through the many forms Queer Cinema can take, The Frida Cinema is proud to present Kantemir Balagov’s devastating postwar drama: Beanpole.

In the ruins of Leningrad just after the end of World War II, two young women struggle to rebuild their lives after serving together on the front lines. Iya, a physically imposing nurse known as “Beanpole,” suffers from mysterious seizures that leave her incapacitated, while her fiercely determined friend Masha returns from the war carrying a secret that binds their futures together. As the two women attempt to find some semblance of normalcy amid the devastation, their intense and often volatile relationship becomes the center of their shattered world.

Winner of the Best Director prize in the Un Certain Regard section at Cannes, Balagov’s Beanpole is a haunting portrait of survival. Less explicitly queer as some of the other films in this series, this is an overwhelming portrait of two women searching for connection in a world that has been almost completely destroyed.