In Crystal Swan you’ll meet Velya, an aspiring club DJ living in Minsk who doesn’t fit in Belarus. So she tries to get a U.S. visa to go live a better life abroad. The only problem is that she doesn’t have a respectable job to put on her visa application. So she puts down a fake job and adds a fake telephone number. However, when the visa officials say they will call her to confirm her application, she goes on a journey to rural Belarus to track down the number and try and make her American dream come true.
Witnesses follows a group of brothers who have returned from the front lines of the Croatian-Serbian War as broken men. Their thirst for revenge fuels a late night attack on a Serbian neighbor. Rumors of witnesses pushes them to solemnly work to eliminate all of them. However, stuck in a bleak city on lockdown in a narrative that keeps replaying the past indicates that their fate is unavoidable.
It feels like the three brothers are doomed right from the start when they murder their Serbian neighbor. As they drive towards his house crammed into a small car, they’re completely silent and lifeless. Their lack of emotion makes it feel like their condemned to act instead of acting willingly. After the murder, they appear solemnly sat around the table in their mother’s house in silence. Their mother is dressed black in mourning, and their father is lying next door in an open coffin. An empty bar is the only other place the brothers are pictured, sipping on pints of beer in silence. It feels like they’ve already resigned themselves to their fate and are simply waiting for it to catch up with them.
Their hopelessness is also imbued into the setting. The skies are constantly overcast which shrouds everything underneath them in a bleak palette of greys. The lack of light makes the brothers faces appear more ghostly and pale, in contrast to the more vibrant colors of their flashbacks on the front lines of the war in a time before they’d lost hope. Now, with trauma from the war and having murdered a neighbor, their pale faces are a mark of the life that has left them. They’re sleepwalking like zombies towards their fate.
The narrative structure also serves to construct the prison of trauma they’re stuck in. Following the murder, they’re never given the same freedom as in the opening scene where the camera follows them around the town in their car in one shot. As the film moves on, the same scenes start replaying: scenes of the three brothers in the bar, scenes of the three brothers around the table by their dead dad, and scenes of the three brothers at funerals. Repeatedly showing the brothers in the same places traps them within a limited area. Furthermore, the scenes are all shot with still cameras that don’t move, mimicking their guilt by trapping them within the frame. Even though they haven’t been found guilty, the way the cyclical narrative and fixed cameras become their prison. They’re stuck within the deserted town to be consumed by their guilt and trauma from the war.
The bleak setting, emotionless characters, and cyclical narrative imbues hopelessness into the look and tone of Witnesses, turning it into a gloomy but effective film about the futility of war and hate, and the grief and trauma it causes.
What to Watch Next
If you’re looking for more bleak portrayals of the Balkan Wars, I strongly recommend watching:
The Load: A road trip movie following one Serbian man’s truck journey from Kosovo to Belgrade. It’s also his journey to becoming aware of the grim reality of the war.
Shok: A short film that depicts the brutal occupation of Kosovo.
Or if you’d rather watch more bleak films featuring characters blindly moving forward in divided countries check out Mozambique’s Sleepwalking Landor Rwanda’s The Mercy of the Jungle.
If you like your films bleak and unfriendly, check out this shady film which stalks a phone scammer. There’s no bright colours, lighting, or friendly characters to make you feel at home. Those Who Are Fine is for those wanting to step into the lonely life of the phone scammer and the people they affect.
The Pencil is bleak. It features an artist that travels to a remote Russian town over 1,000 miles from Moscow to be closer to her partner who’s been wrongly imprisoned there. She becomes a teacher who believes she can make a difference, but has to confront a violent bully.
The teacher is a naive ‘Im going to make a difference’ teacher. She’s the Russian version of Edward James Olmos in Stand and Deliver and Robin Williams in Good Will Hunting. However, unlike the two American films, her class bully is from the criminal family that runs the town. A family that has the police department, prison, school, and any other public services in their pocket. The bully is free to extort and bully both his fellow students and teachers.
Unfortunately for her, her naive beliefs that the bad kid would take to her first art lesson are misguided (she’s obviously never taught before). She doesn’t exactly try to help him either when she says he has no talent in front of the class in their first lesson. From there, her relationship with the bully spirals downhill until the naive hope she had disappears.
The Pencil is shot well. You get a real sense of setting – the isolation from everywhere else (you never see a way out), the juxtaposition of the freedom of nature with the oppressive factories spewing smoke non stop and big run down apartment blocks, and the grey colour palette which is brought to life briefly by the teacher on their art walks.
Secondly, pay attention to the pencils in the film as the film exploits them well. There’s the local factories that create them manned by the working class locals whose kids are being taught to use them to create. Using them instead of creating them gives the kids a way out of the town. It’s also a symbol of the naive teacher’s wish to offer her students a way out, which is easily snapped by the bully in the very first lesson. It’s also no coincidence that the ending features the wood logs that are used to make pencils.
The Pencil is a clever bleak film. However, the bleakness doesn’t present the best picture of Russia. It presents a society without hope that is scared of standing up to the corrupt powers in control. If you can handle hopelessness, it is worth a watch.
P.S. To all the audience members generalising Russian (and Eastern European) film as bleak, please watch more movies before making assumptions. There’s plenty of comedies out there, and plenty of bleak American films that present a bleak picture of the U.S. too.
The opening of Apples looks bleak. There aren’t any vibrant colors and not much light (as you can see from the shot above). The main character starts out in a dark apartment bashing his head against the wall, and walks out into an overcast day with dark clothing. Even the narrow aspect ratio restricts an open view of the world he exists in. Apples has all the hallmarks of a depressing movie. But the bleakness is countered by a lot of deadpan comedy which ultimately provides a great commentary on modern day Instagram culture.
Not long after the main character walks out his apartment, he falls asleep on a bus and wakes up without his memory. What’s strange is that he doesn’t seem too startled or surprised that his memory is gone. It’s just another thing to happen to him that day. As a result it doesn’t feel like a big deal to us either. We also don’t know what he’s lost as his character hasn’t been established at this point. We don’t know how he feels, what he’s thinking, or if he has a family or job. We don’t even know his name.
The deadpan humor kicks off in the hospital ward. It’s where he discovers his love for apples, and where he’s put through multiple memory tests. One highlight was watching him take a music identification test. The ‘I’ve got this one in the bag’ certainty in his eyes as he pairs Jingle Bells to a completely unrelated flashcard image is hilarious. In the hospital he finds a lot of other people like him as the victims of the memory loss epidemic increases. For those who aren’t claimed by family members, the doctors offer a program to help them create a new life.
Each patient on the program is given a Polaroid camera and scrapbook (the film exists in a world without internet and mobile phones). They’re then given a bunch of tasks to do which they have to capture on camera as proof of completion. Most of the tasks are fairly ordinary life experiences like riding a bike, but they get more exceptional as the film progresses. Our protagonist goes about it fairly robotically – capturing everything he needs to without appearing to enjoy the journey. He’s left with a document which appears to show a much more interesting life than he actually leads and had led (before the amnesia). It’s a critique of the Instagram culture which superficially picks out the very best life pictures vs. the actual boring lives we live outside of the camera lens. As despite the great collection of photos our unnamed protagonist has put together, his character still doesn’t exist. He’s still nameless, characterless, and emotionless.
Head to our AFI Fest Hub for more reviews and short films from AFI Fest 2020.
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