Ukraine, Kiev boarding school for deaf students; Sergey is the latest arrival and must submit to the iron rules of the gangs that dominate and run prostitution, trafficking of all kinds, theft, violence and abuse.

The repetition of daily abuses and gimmicks is managed through a paranoid and compulsive organization: the only real goal is money.

There is no feeling other than Sergey's falling in love with one of the girls inducted into prostitution in a truck stop. Although reciprocated, money will always highlight the premise of their encounters.

The passports given to the girls and their alleged sale on Italian soil will converge the already extremely alienating situation into a tragic though inevitable conclusion.

Entirely filmed in sign language, without subtitles or voice over it requires from the viewer a concentration without pause.

130 minutes devoid of any soundtrack other than noises, the only elements audible to the hearing.

Only the body speaks but it is the most animal body; without words there is no metaphor, no symbol, no meaning except in the aesthetic message the images impose. Without signifier the meaning remains inexpressible, the gesture expresses the otherwise incomprehensible: this is the contrapasso dedicated to a cinema for the exclusive use and consumption of the hearing.

What is actually understood, what escapes and what is felt by such an experience?

The soundtrack of life disappears in the absence of phonetic language to make way for the deafening sound of noisy silence.

Habit is disrupted and what remains is the helpless body, the hostile skin and the inability to understand because the gesture expresses the incomprehensible and everything is reduced to consumption for its own sake.

Destruction, alienation, marginalization, violence of a humanity that needs another language than the homogenizing word to see itself.

Only through a new way of looking, one that is not clothed in the deafening sound of the consuming word that distorts reality, is it perhaps possible to see again....

Between language and the real there is incommensurability, and the truth of the real can only announce itself in language, whatever it may be, without language being able to adequately express it.

And if the image always has the last word, Slaboshpytskkiv's film IMPOSES it.

20-Aug-2023 by Beatrice