Courtesy ESSE Production House
It’s tough to be a Ukranian teenager these days, what with all the who-likes-who, what-does-the-future-hold questions, plus that growing will-my-country-exist-in-a-few weeks thing. At a time when Ukraine’s sovereignty is on shaky ground, it feels almost counterproductive to focus on the most typical problems teenagers face, but Stop-Zemila from writer/director Kateryna Gornostai dares to suggest otherwise, providing a film so familiar yet unexpectedly mesmerizing.
Masha (Maria Fedorchenko) is a loner who is isolated from her social peers. She holds intense loyalty for her two best friends, punk-rocker Senia (Arsenii Markov) and quiet depressive Yana (Yana Bratiychuk). Meanwhile, Masha’s crush Sasha (Oleksandr Ivanov) navigates a closed-off relationship with his mother that keeps him dependent on friends for expression.
What makes Stop-Zemila unique is its relation to current events. Instability hovers over youthful vices, even if the kids don’t talk about it, and Senia is a refugee from Eastern Ukraine, where the proxy wars pushed him out. The kids go to military training as part of their high school curriculum (military conscription is mandatory for men in Ukraine). They train with guns and the piano and learn battlefield medicine, but also the science behind love. Irony is the point: They are desperate for a sense of permanency in this faux-stable world—something director Gornostai is certainly familiar with given her background documenting Ukraine’s political turmoil nearly a decade ago in Euromaidan. Rough Cut.
You’ll still find chinks in the armor among her deep commitment. Stop-Zemila lacks needed -clarity and charm and relies too heavily on montage and dreamscape imagery. By its conclusion, it might feel pointless, but cinema’s great gift is to see life in far away places not as a gawking tourist, but more -quietly and accurately. Gornostai finds brilliance within young Ukranian society, but also the looming threat that it could all be snatched away from them.
7
+Sensitive and relevant
-Meandering almost to a fault
Stop-Zemila
Directed by Gornostai
With Fedorchenko, Markov, Bratiychuk and Ivanov
Opens Fri, Jan 28, CCA. NR. 122 min.
