One can easily say that this is the best Crimean Tartar road movie/dirge/family drama/religious film/contemporary Ukrainian war commentary that you might to get ones hands on! The fact that the dialogue in the film consists of Ukrainian Tartar, Ukrainian, and Russian gives one a clue to the cultural complexity of life in Ukraine today and indeed right now in all of Eastern Europe from the Baltic sea to the edges of the lesser Caucasus mountains of Nagorno-Karabakh. This this is a beautifully filmed movie that has a not-unfamiliar story arc, picking up on various social archetypes and focused mainly on the tight family unit of father and son and immediate relatives in the wake of what looks like the untimely torture & death of an elder son, on the front, of the interminable war by Putin on Ukraine. It is unfortunate that the average western reader using subtitles, like me, cannot understand the transitions here in the dialogue between the use of different languages. I suppose one could have had different colours for subtitles. Never mind. The exosition is all show and no tell - The father is angry his would-have been daughter in law has Christian Orthodox icons... Being spoken to in Russian is a bit like a proud Welsh person being given instructions in English. It may be understood, but it can feel disrespectful. The boy sheepishly mentions to Dad he's now learning to speak Ukrainian pretty well. The fact is that ever since the beginning of the 20th century, the Crimean indigenous population, the Muslim Tartars, have faced annihilation including the near erasure of their culture & language and indeed their significance in contemporary Ukrainian life. These kinds of powerful undercurrents are all eluded to within this deceptively simple coming of age & travel drama. The divisions that surface within the protagonist's family to some extent reflect the cultural and ethnic complexity of contemporary life in Ukraine. One doesn't have to be a genius to pick up on these notions, or to have to have done a degree in modern European history but I kind of wish I knew a bit more to appreciate the movie at a greater depth. Nevertheless, as I say, it's a beautiful film with stunning if bleak location filming in areas like the waterways of the Kherson oblast in the stunning finale, which could not be filmed at this present time due to the escalation of the war which would have made it way too dangerous now. Quite an insight into the new Europe - unstable if not openly tumultuous.
