Lamas’ curious film is posited around the unrecognised country, Transnistria, which was part of the old USSR and is now on the fringes of the EU, with borders with Russia, Romania, Moldova and Ukraine. It’s a device which highlights the ignorance around this region. This writer, for one, was unsure whether the film was discussing a real or a fictional state. The film follows one man as he crosses and re-crosses various borders, coming and going from his home state. There are several sequences where the screen is left blank, with the recorded dialogue of the unsympathetic border guards played as audio. The pace is languorous and there is the sense that the film, functioning on limited resources, is cobbling itself together, with one of two grand setpiece scenes adding a sense of scale. It’s a timely meditation on the European-Russian divide, (reminiscent of Sharunas Bartas’ Frost), taking the viewer towards the Donbass hinterland where a forgotten war rumbles on, like a distant forest fire which could head in any direction, depending on which way the wind blows.
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