As a spry centenarian, Russian cartoonist Boris Efimov (who died last year at 109) had lived under, and in sometimes frightening proximity to, three consecutive nexuses of power as his country wound through Czarist, Soviet and federal rule. His reluctant connection with the state-sponsored media that employed him to lampoon political targets, including dubiously nominated "enemies of the people," took its cruelest turn after Stalin ordered the execution of his beloved brother Mikhail Koltsov, inspiration for Karkov in Hemingway's For Whom the Bell Tolls. Effectively blacklisted afterward as the relative of a dissident, Efimov was nonetheless spared the Gulags and eventually-through complicated machinations also likely guided by Stalin, who was a great fan of his work-reinstated as Pravda's top cartoonist. Kevin McNeer's utterly absorbing peek behind the Red Curtain investigates this complex relationship between Russia's greatest political cartoonist and the dreaded dictator who earned his tremulous but abiding respect.—Mill Valley Film Festival

By the time political cartoonist Boris Efimov died at 109, his pen had churned out cartoons for the Soviet press on every major event of the century. Whether during the dark days of WWII, when Russia faced annihilation by the Nazis (who had orders to hang Efimov on sight) or during the super power days of the Cold War, Efimov always had an inexhaustible supply of ironic imagery to deploy against the enemy. But behind his titanic career is what Efimov calls 'a wound that does not heal,' the execution of his older brother Mikhail Koltsov: a famous journalist, friend of Earnest Hemingway and Soviet spy. The keys to Koltsov's early death and Efimov's survival are bound up in their complex relationship with the dictator Stalin.—Anonymous