Northern Caucasus, Autonomous Republic of Kabardino-Balkaria: Nalchik 1998.

The period in which Ilana's story is set sees the intensification of the second Chechen conflict, and some videotapes highlight the atrocities committed.

The coexistence of various ethnic groups including Kabardians, Balkars, Russians, and Jews makes the coexistence of cultures and traditions rather complicated.

Ilana works as a mechanic in her father's workshop. Her absolutely androgynous clothing and demeanor cannot hide her beauty and her emotional intensity, experienced through an extraordinary relationship with her father and brother.

Her mother, extremely emotional about the engagement of her beloved son David, makes her wear a dress, and the evening after the ceremony, the future spouses are kidnapped.

The ransom demand is beyond their economic means, and due to the intensifying conflicts between the various local ethnic groups, the kidnapped family, of Jewish religion, decides to stay low-profile and not seek the intervention of local authorities.

Raising the necessary money will involve losing their business and home and the need to move elsewhere.

However, the stakes to raise the necessary money are too high for Ilana: she would have to get engaged to a Jewish boy and, as a betrothed, obtain money. However, she loves a Kabardian boy, Zalim, whom her family has never accepted.

Ilana's reaction to this imposition will be violent, especially because of the absolutely conflicting relationship with her mother, who has always preferred her brother David.

The girl's unpredictable reactions will be the main element of the narrative, as they will reveal, for better or worse, her extreme attachment to the family.

On one hand, no one can make her do what she doesn't want to do, but on the other hand, she will always sacrifice herself for the family's cause.

A bitter, lacerating ending precisely because it is conciliatory.

A tense, nervous story, as only the urgency of a debut work can create.

The 26-year-old Balagov, a student of Sokurov, triggers an expressive mechanism of rare urgency; his work represents a precious promise through a practically unknown historical context, a human condition that is so recent but so distant in its spatial/temporal reality.

A restless, vibrant, intrusive cinema; extreme, penetrating performances; a play of faces of life, of exhausted bodies, of overwhelming realities.

The life of a family, an unresolved ethno-cultural-political condition, exacerbated economic-social dimensions.

The loves, expectations, disappointments, hopes, fragments of a legality that cannot be invoked because the private ius vitae et necis is above any latent state of public law.

A film that produces a new, extreme, contemporary gaze, forcing vision and radicalizing the artistic gesture through an apparent false classicism of form in a revolutionary ultra-contemporaneity of the same.

A cinematic déjà vu through which it seems to have already seen something otherwise never seen.

Balagov has managed to bring to life an immense cinematic expression that hides the deception that only true art can achieve.

22-Jun-2023 by Beatrice