Mikhail Kalatozov’s The Cranes Are Flying is a remarkable piece of film-making. Made in 1957, Mikhail Kalatozov guides the camera in perpetual flight, rising, drifting, gliding along with the story, leading the characters through their dreams and lives. As melo-dramatic as the narrative may be, the technical elements, the self-awareness of the camera and the theory of film-making, all of it before France’s Nouveau Vague, are astonishing, like a supreme being playing with a camera and showing us simpletons just what is possible. Cinema not only as art, but of our very dreams.