Syostry

I really enjoyed this film. The story of two half sisters on the run from a crew of gangster kidnappers who must survive, bond and finally live one day at a time. I only wish American films were this meditative and watchable.

Directed by gangster movie heartthrob Sergei Bodrov Junior, this might be expected to be a shoot-'em up gangster caper movie. It isn't - in very Russian fashion, it's more about characters and issues than shooting, and while there are a couple of violent incidents, the pace is slow and the tone solemn.

The two sisters at the centre of the film - thirteen year old Sveta, poor and abandoned by her father, who longs to go off and be a sniper in the army, and spoilt eight-year old Dina, doted on by her gangster father - represent two very different aspects of modern Russia: the old, poor but moral; the young, cynical and money-obsessed. Sveta lives in a shabby home with her grandmother. Dina gets to live in a lavish apartment with their mother, and goes off to violin lessons. Not surprisingly, there's no love lost between the two.

But adversity, in the form of gang rivals on the search of some missing money and with few scruples about how to get their hands on it, throws the two together, plunging them into the Dickensian world of Russia's underground - dangerous and uncertain - and makes them value each other more than they ever have before. A couple of very naturalistic performances from the two makes this a fine, touching film.

Syostry is a melancholic and touching movie, which gets quite close to the new Russian reality. The reality where a teenager girl dreams of becoming whether a sniper in Chechnya or a bodyguard for a new Russian (gangster).

Oksana Akinshina, who plays the older sister, has something inevitably tragic in her appearance (watch Lilja 4-ever by Lukas Moodysson). She reminded me Jean Seberg form the J.-L. Godard's Breathless and Juliette Biinoche from the L. Carax' Les Amants du Pont-Neuf. This movie is the second and last film shot by Sergei Bodrov Jr., who got a cult status (just like Victor Tsoy whose music he had used in Syostry), when he was reported missing in 2002 after the avalanche accident.

This film touched me when i watched at a movie theater mostly as the last film of the young director Sergei Bodrov Jr. The story of a possible kidnapping of a child is common but you feel weird watching this film, you consider the power of money is above the human souls, bodies and lives in the birth of a new nation from its ashes... It was very melancholic to notice that S. B. Jr. is dead and SYOSTRY was his first and last movie. For this man and his dream to show us the new "corrupted" face of Russia the jobbery and the "corrosion" comparing with old "pure" and bureaucratic face of USSR, this is like an ode to life and death. He seems to fight the mobs inside the "story" even if the happy end became really "deadly" to this young cinematic "poet" through the strong family relations between two sisters, the "old Russia" and the "new Russia"... the Russia of Capital and the modern gangsters...

Music of the film was lyric, melodic and full of different emotions with sadness being the top as Victor Tsoy is dead too, as much many realistic things happened we felt spooky and chill more about the young children or adults "victims" of "mobs".

This is a must to see if you love Russian cinema, old or new, and i am sure that you will be touched very much. The

A film that no longer conveys anything to the public.