Pamfir

Having found an honest job abroad after years of smuggling, Leonid returns home for winter to his loving, pious wife Olena and his impressionable teenage son, Nazar. When the young boy sets fire to the local church to prevent his father from returning to work, Leonid is forced to go back to his old ways to pay for the damages.

Dmytro Sukholytkyy-Sobchuk’s Pamfir is a simmering family drama set in a wooded village near the Ukraine-Romania border in the Carpathian Mountains. The primal beauty of this place conceals a fallen world ruled by an unforgiving god named Oreste, a corrupt forest officer who doesn’t appreciate the fiercely independent Leonid cutting into his business. As the village gears up for a pagan festival at Christmas time, old fault lines and atavistic instincts resurface both within the family and outside, threatening to overwhelm Leonid’s hard-earned domestic life with the law of the jungle.

A visually arresting work, Pamfir is constructed entirely out of long, intricately choreographed Steadicam shots, that both immerse us into the world on display and keep a tight control on the emotional temperature of the film. Balancing unspeakable brutality with genuine tenderness, Sukholytkyy-Sobchuk offers an accomplished debut feature about family values on the edge of civilisation.

– Srikanth Srinivasan