It’s the summer holidays, and forty days have passed since Larysa’s father died. In a fairy-tale sequence, the young woman traverses a swampy landscape where a group of couples surrender to their sexual desires. Larysa’s boyfriend Scar, a handsome criminal, is caught up in a spiral of crime in which he becomes ever more enmeshed as the story evolves. His is a world of post-Soviet prefab concrete buildings, Larysa’s a deceptively idyllic village community somewhere in the Ukraine. Their relationship soon becomes Larysa’s downfall when, all too soon, the family’s objections to it turn violent. Vitka is a little girl who also refuses to toe the line. Rebelling against her grandmother and her rules and regulations, she daydreams her life away in a fantasy land of surreal images.
The world in Marysia Nikitiuk’s feature film debut feels somehow wired; brutal in its moments of reality and yet beguiling as soon as it veers towards the fantastic. Regarded as the wild new hope of Ukrainian cinema, this writer-director has already won the ScripTeast Award in Cannes for her screenplay for Koly padayut dereva.