My Conversation With Jesse Bishop, MSPIFF Programing Director
“GRACE” БЛАЖЬ | BLAZH Dir. Ilya Povolotsky. Russia, 2023
This is a road trip movie – a genre with an existential core. There is a faint plot, but the more compelling aspects of the film are the observations of sublime landscapes and glimpses of other lives being lived along the way. A father and adolescent daughter living in a red van crossing, in no rush whatsoever, vast swaths of rural Russia of today, though outside of the cities (and far from reliable internet), people live as though it is 1995 or even 1960. It is an eerie feeling to time travel like that. The sense of eternity, boredom, and listlessness is uncanny coming from an activity-jammed over-scheduled culture like ours. The relationship between father and daughter is a strange mixture of the impersonal and the intimate. There is minimal dialogue. A lot is just understood – communicated with glances, posture – unnecessary to say aloud. The girl is motherless, the father ill-equipped to give the girl the life she wants (and what does she want? not an aimless life on the road for one). But the father does his best. What else can he do? This is a world of resignation.
Continue reading A Meandering Review About a Meandering Film From the Minneapolis St. Paul International Film Festival (MSPIFF) by Kitty Aal
