The protagonist has nowhere to live and no money to live on—he rents out his own living space in the old center of Odesa to a woman who stubbornly refuses to pay. On top of the housing problem, there is the irritating necessity of recording a video message for a once-close woman-friend who has emigrated to America. The very idea of a shared language between former friends on opposite sides of the ocean seems absurd. The year is 1999.

This laconic sketch was written by Kira Muratova’s longstanding collaborator Serhii Chetvertkov, who also appears in the lead role. The legendary director entered the debut competition at the Molodist film festival in 2000—having “debuted” in a short film field! Ukrainian cinema of the 1990s came definitively to a close; or rather, to put it more precisely, it died. Shot on whatever locations were at hand with virtually no budget, the film seems to observe the material world in the final seconds before total annihilation. Still a film with such a hard topic turned out to be simultaneously one of the lightest, most playful, and most witty of Muratova’s career.

The director offers a bitter summation of a decade that began with the opening of new horizons and the search for a new artistic language—and ended, if one is to believe the authors of “Letter to America”, in the impossibility of uttering a single word. The Iron Curtain had fallen, but in its place arose an even stronger divide—invisible, and therefore more impenetrable. Gradually, instead of attempting to build new and complex relationships with the world, the post-Soviet psyche exploded into a powerful ressentiment, which Muratova captures on camera more precisely than anyone. The letter has not been received. Return it to the sender.

A new digital version of the film was created from a scan of a 35mm print by the Film Laboratory of the Dovzhenko Centre in 2024.