... Aleksei Uchitel's Dnevnik ego zheny (His Wife's Diary), awarded the follow-up Grand Prize, comes across as a convincing portrait of poet-writer Ivan Bunin (1870-1953), who received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1933. Although stylistically the film bears the heavy imprint of the Russian art film, we do feel the joy and pain of the troubled Bunin (Andrei Smirnov) through the diary kept by his loving yet distressed wife (Galina Tiunina) during their exile in the south of France before, during, and after the Second World War – ironically, Bunin was to die (on a train to deliver a lecture in Italy) in the same year as Stalin, his lifelong nemesis. ...