Seventh Route is a light melodramatic and fascinating film with an interesting story from today’s Ukraine. There are two protagonists: a young American girl of Ukrainian stock who tries to depict her mother’s homeland with a video camera, and a middle-aged poet who would rather have an ordinary job, but makes ends meet as a tourist guide by appointment. When the American girl and the poet meet during a tourist guided tour, they become fascinated by each other. The wayward poet has decided to show his customers the ‘seventh route’. That is a route that doesn’t really exist: he makes it up as he goes along and takes the tourists past his own house and suggests that it is an important monument. On the route he recites his own poetry, episodes that are shown in strange coloured black & white shots.Festival visitors may remember Ilyenko’s previous feature Foochow (1995): a crazy Dadaist film with ironic, romantic and occasionally mystical angles. This new film is also not without its irony and offers a warm view of a country that is still internationally underrepresented in film.
