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Yak Tam Katia? Review — Yak Tam Katia? (2022) Film Review from the 75th Annual Locarno Film Festival, a movie directed by Christina Tynkevych, written by Serhil Kastornykh and Christina Tynkevych and starring Anastasiya Karpenko, Kateryna Kozlova, Iryna Verenych-Ostrovska, Viktor Zhdanov, Yelena Khokhlatkina, Aleksey Cherevatenko and Olena Rechych. Yak Tam Katia? (How is Katia?) is [...]

Continue reading: Film Review: Yak Tam Katia?: Powerful Dramatic Film from Ukraine is Well Acted Though Emotionally Devastating [Locarno 2022]...

Roman Bondarchuk handles this strange tale about an interpreter left stranded with some locals with deadpan poise

“That’s our wandering buoy. It slipped its anchor near the dam. It appears and disappears at will.” A light, unfathomable absurdity governs this 2018 fiction debut by Ukrainian documentarian Roman Bondarchuk, set in the area around the city of Kherson; a sun-roasted steppe north of the Crimea where Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe (Osce) interpreter Lukas (Serhiy Stepansky) becomes stranded. He’s escorting an SUV full of foreign delegates when it breaks down and he wanders off in search of a mobile signal. On his return, both car and foreigners have vanished.

Hitching a ride, Lukas is invited to stay with Vova (Viktor Zhdanov), a middle-aged potterer living with his mother and daughter in a capacious ramshackle construction on the banks of the Dnieper river. So begins Lukas’s initiation – like...

Make room on the bench, Sergei Loznitsa (“Donbass”). Scoot along, Myroslav Slaboshpytskiy (“The Tribe”). It’s time to share the title of contemporary Ukraine’s most intriguing filmmaker with helmer Roman Bondarchuk, an erstwhile documentarian (“Ukrainian Sheriffs”), who makes a mesmerizing fiction debut with “Volcano.” An impressively shot drama marbled with welcome notes of absurdist comedy and wry humor, the movie is set in southern Ukraine’s Kherson province, just above Crimea, where a Kiev-based interpreter for the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (Osce) finds himself stranded after a series of misadventures. Following its world premiere in Karlovy Vary last July, the consistently involving film has screened at more than 30 international festivals and collected numerous kudos. Its Ukrainian theatrical rollout begins April 5.

Thirtysomething Lukas is driving three international Osce personnel on an inspection tour of military checkpoints when their SUV breaks down on a dirt road in the steppe.