

There’s a reason director Michal Blasko and screenwriter Jakub Medvecký wrote Irina (Vita Smachelyuk) and her son Igor (Gleb Kuchuk) as Ukrainian nationals. Victim doesn’t quite work if they are native Czechs; its impact demands that they also be outsiders attempting to build a home just like the Roma they and their host country are quick to villainize. Not when they should know better. They should be able to understand what it’s like to come to a foreign place and start over again. We see it too as Irina converses with incoming Ukrainians hoping to find as much success as she has. What, therefore, is the difference? Why does an entire city band together for her and vociferously denounce the Roma? She is white.
Painting her as the heroic mother of a promising gymnast currently laying in a hospital bed with zero hope of continuing the sport...
Painting her as the heroic mother of a promising gymnast currently laying in a hospital bed with zero hope of continuing the sport...
- 9/16/2022
- by Jared Mobarak
- The Film Stage

It isn’t that people’s first instincts are bad in “Victim,” Slovak director Michal Blaško’s compelling, apprehensive feature debut. A distraught Ukrainian mother travelling back to her adopted home in the Czech Republic to be by her injured son’s hospital bedside, for example, will find someone willing to drive her when her bus is delayed. It’s just that once they find those instincts lining up with their pre-existing prejudices — say, when the boy alleges, or heavily implies, that the ones who beat him up were of Roma background — then those same people will erase all nuance, ignore all complexity, and do almost anything to drink further into the intoxication of righteous moral outrage. Even if it means shoring up a teenager’s lie.
The mother is Irina, a hardworking housekeeper who aspires to open a hairdressing salon with her friend Sveta (Inna Zhulina), and who is...
The mother is Irina, a hardworking housekeeper who aspires to open a hairdressing salon with her friend Sveta (Inna Zhulina), and who is...
- 9/10/2022
- by Jessica Kiang
- Variety Film + TV
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