Iconic Mondays: VIOLIN ON THE ROOF

Fiddler on the Roof, directed by Norman Jewison, USA, 1971, 181 minutes

The film will be presented in a digitally restored version. In a small village, a new day comes to life, against the background of the rising Sun, standing on the roof, the titular violinist begins to play. Each of us here is a violinist on the roof,” Tevye - the main character - tells the audience. It's not easy to keep your balance standing on the roof and trying to get a nice melody out of the violin, it's dangerous. What allows you to maintain balance? Tradition! This is how one of the most famous musicals in the history of cinema begins. Poor milkman Tevye (Topol), lives in Anatevka - a small village located somewhere on the outskirts of the tsarist empire. A small Jewish community has lived here for years, adjacent to Orthodox Russians, whom it tries not to get in the way. God endowed Tevy with five daughters, whom, according to tradition, he must marry with the help of a matchmaker, starting with the eldest Tzeitel. Soon he will have to choose between the happiness of his daughters, who will be guided more by their own feelings than the choice of matchmaker, and the long-standing tradition in which he himself was brought up. Against the background of this seemingly frivolous story, a communist movement is slowly emerging, bringing with it a breath of change, and there is also a growing resentment towards Jews, the consequences of which everyone knows today. In the story of the milkman, comedy mixes tragedy, trivial and weighty matters with completely serious ones, and all this is told to the sounds of music in a spirit of melancholy and nostalgia for a world that has already irrevocably passed.