Shadow Life evokes folklore and Communist festivals. The vignettes are performed by shadow puppets; the form of the hand is a synecdoche for the manual labour of workers and peasants, while the silhouette medium allows quick metamorphoses: a grandstanding dictator to a barking dog, a swaying tree to a crane transforming the landscape. A remake of a 2000 Russian pop hit serves as the soundtrack to the third part, Transmigration. (CF)