Mayak

Stunningly beautiful, both in terms of subject matter as well as cinematography. Dialogue is mostly relegated to the background, creating a poetic meditation on the effects of war on life in a village.

The turmoil and struggle of living a life in war. Pretty unusual way of image composition, giving a strong sense of the tension and connection between the protagonist and her milieu, and between her reality, past and imagination: highly intimate and affecting, while remaining emotionally controlled. Singular and full of character.

Abstracting from the specificities of the conflict that constitutes its setting, this uses sound and image in a remarkable, carefully controlled way, to compose a meditation on war, displacement and the refugee's loss of home. The influences are clear enough, not only in the individual compositions, but in the dreamlike character of the whole, yet the result has a way of combining the material and the mysterious that seems to correspond to this 25-year-old director's singular perspective.

A dream of war.