A Soviet film adaptation of Tolstoy's 'The Death of Ivan Ilyich'.

'A Simple Death...' (Russian: Prostaya Smert') is a 1985 drama film directed by Alexander Kaidanovsky. It was screened in the Un Certain Regard section at the 1987 Cannes Film Festival.

Aleksandr Kaidanovsky is a follower of the well-known metaphysic Soviet film director Andrey Tarkovski. He played the leading role in Tarkovsky's cult film 'Stalker'.

The short story by Leo Tolstoy "The Death of Ivan Ilyich" is a masterpiece of Russian literature, and the director managed to express the original story very deep. The story is about a man who says he is completely happy, and soon starts to get seriously ill. He was a very narrow-minded person and never cared much about the main questions of existence such as death and its meaning, so when he looses health all those scary questions come to his mind. He speaks to God, sees the beyond world, starts to believe in orthodoxy, but his time is over.