Our Last Days ... In Moscow
1987 · 55m · Canada
Directed by Martin Duckworth
Genres: drama, musical, romance
Tones: contemplative, melancholic, tender
Pianists Pierre Jasmin and Kuo-Yen, who fell in love while studying in Vienna, spend their final days together in Moscow, where her performance in the Tchaikovsky Competition will decide her future before she returns to Taiwan.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
A 55-minute romance about classical musicians saying goodbye in Moscow sounds like the most consensus-pleasing festival slot imaginable — which is exactly why Duckworth's refusal to sentimentalize the Tchaikovsky Competition or turn heartbreak into melodrama feels quietly subversive, even if nobody else notices.
Duckworth locates this film squarely in the tradition of intimate documentary-drama hybrids (Varda, Depardon), where the presence of the camera becomes another voice in the room; the formal choice to let the Tchaikovsky Competition breathe as both plot and philosophical weight gives the work a considered architecture that justifies every one of its fifty-five minutes.
The decision to frame the entire emotional arc through the pianists' hands — practicing, touching, performing — transforms what could've been a generic lovers'-last-hurrah into something tactile and irreplaceable, where technique and tenderness become literally the same gesture.