The internal pressures of a blended family are put under further stress by war in Damian Kocur’s immersive and timely drama. Enjoying the last day of their holiday to Tenerife, Ukrainian dad Roman (Roman Lutskyi) and his new wife Nastya (Anastasiia Karpienko) are a typical middle-class couple, while Roman’s daughter Sofia (Sofia Berezovska) is a classically bored teenager, more interested in her phone than soaking up the sun with her parents and young brother Fedir (Fedir Pugachov). The everyday holiday woes of a parking ticket here and a bitten tongue there will soon be swept away by the news that Russia has invaded their homeland.
As with his first feature , Kocur – re-teaming with writer Marta Konarzewska – uses inner turmoil as a mirror to the frictions of the wider world. Poland’s entry for this year’s Best International Feature Oscar, premiered in Toronto and is already making its presence felt on the festival circuit. The hot-button nature of the material coupled with its strong family element is likely to catch the eye of distributors further along the line.
The sense of the family’s sudden insecurity is stoked by the normality around them. Although they can’t go home, the hotel immediately tells them they will waive the cost of bed and board, leaving them in a sort of luxury limbo as they watch their country being bombarded from afar. Just because there’s a war on doesn’t mean that peace suddenly breaks out in the family either.
If anything, the n.