The movie's love story between the blind-since-birth Lilly and the just-gone-blind Jakob is adorable, cute, lovely ... and totally predictable. Other characters like Lilly's mother and sister are only briefly shown as somewhat weird people whose behavior is mostly following clichés or otherwise leaves a lot of questions with the audience without exploring it further.
Fritzi Haberlandt's acting is superb. This is about the best thing about this movie.
Having worked in a social project with blind people, I could not help to think throughout the movie that the plot was quite flawed. Lilly walks around with her white stick in a neighborhood she has never been to before. She asks her friend and mother to just leave her alone at some desolate gas station/restaurant in the middle of rural Russia. "C'mon, get real!", I wanted to shout. Only a suicidal blind person would do that. And no decent person with eyesight, let alone her own mother, would do that to her.
The movie was trying to get the message across, that going blind is not the end of your life. That there are still many things you can enjoy, if you only make the effort to attend special training, re-organise your life, and learn to "see" the world in a different way. Agreed. What the movie completely fails to show is the reality that without a guide person a blind man or woman is completely lost outside his/her familiar surroundings.
