Ovsyanki

Somewhere up north in Scandinavia a young woman dies. Her husband wants to cremate her, following the rites of the land he lives in. One of his workers comes with him and together they start on a road trip through life itself.

A short introduction is used to define the world of the film - a desolate town in the middle of nowhere that is filled to the rim with people that follow a somewhat strange set of rites and rulings, but that are perfectly happy with them. The main theme in their life is a large river that flows through their country and that is more or less the base of their lives.

As it starts rolling it is mostly just two players working their ways around each other, portraying their odd lives with perfection. The story is amazing, the way they go through it is maddening and reminding of a lot of other strange road trips. The Straight Story and Cargo 200 come to mind. It has some fleeting moments where the pace drops to a stand still though and thus it isn't entirely satisfactory. It's good, but not very good.

7 out of 10 bottles of vodka

Every now and then a director has a script and a set of performers who work with a single ambition. To do the very best possible. This film is perfection. There are times when the symbolism is a inch a way from breaking into reality but it never does, The sense of place and the the feelings evoked by a man who must take his dearly beloved wife, who has just died, to the place where they spent their honeymoon to place her on a funeral pile is relentlessly aching. There is a genuine purity about the feelings, some of which are extremely sexually explicit. In one flashback, we see the husband massaging his wife's leg while she plays with herself. The husband has a friend who shares the miles to the spot where the wife will burn, next to a vast river. Has he also loved this woman? Tanya. Did others? Flashbacks are seen in real time with no attempt to break the mood with tenses. It is one of the most poetic films ever made and ten stars are not enough.

Clocking in at a very economical 78 minutes Aleksey Fedorchenko's "Silent Souls" is a remarkable and remarkably beautiful Russian film dealing with both grief and identity but in a manner that is both uplifting and almost surrealistically comic. It is the kind of film that Abbas Kiarostami might make or, in a much broader fashion, the Coens. The plot is both simple and minimalist. A man's wife has died and he wishes to take her body to be buried in the spot where they had spent their honeymoon, and in the custom of their race, but he does not want to involve the authorities so he enlists the help of a colleague, Aist, the film's narrator and its central character and it becomes a road movie unlike any other. Almost nothing happens and yet there is a great feeling that in the midst of death life goes on and that people continue to struggle for happiness at all costs. It's a melancholy subject but it isn't treated in a melancholy way. Little is actually said; these are indeed silent souls and what little story there is unfolds in almost totally visual terms and the cinematography of Mikhail Krichman is superb. An outstanding film that certainly doesn't deserve to get away.

Started as typical Iranian movie, then forget to gain the momentum and after express straying finished as typical Scandinavian movie. It seems like an attempt to create the film about instinct tribe in the instinct or spoofed film-making tradition. But I think I can explain it's festival popularity. Since those talks about sex are still considered as ambiguous and vulgar, "Sex in the city" have no perspective as festival movie, but when you have filmed the tribe that have such age-old tradition, and this tradition is also packed into sacramental funeral ritual, you get an highest level indulgence and also you can redistribute this indulgence between all those highbrowed festival critics. I want that the story would be continued and the Russian "central region" get such get deep developed mythology. More better then hobbit village in the NZ.

Silent Souls. A fitting adapted English title to this film. In short, Aist and Miron serve as the guides to a desolate portrait into the life of the Merya people of Russia. The journey is centered on the grieving of a husband for his wife, and on the the associated death rites. As such, the film gives viewers a passenger's perspective into the customs and thoughts of a people whose rituals have been disappearing. All in all, Silent Souls is informative and simple, dragging viewers slowly into a surprising and symbolic conclusion. It is a film best observed through the gaze of an anthropologist or ethnographer, and taken in with the intention to learn and absorb a culture that to most will be new and foreign. In sum, one ought not to expect Hollywoodian diversions.