LIVING

Death, in the midst of life: Grishka and Anton, newly wedded, fall victim to a brutal assault on their way home from the church. After losing her husband Galya sought comfort in alcohol; just as she begins to see a faint ray of hope she loses her two small daughters as well. Little Artyom longs for his father but his hard-hearted mother won’t let them meet. All the characters console themselves with phantasmal visions in the hope that the dead will return. But do they really come back? And can the bereft ever find healing? Vasiliy Sigarev follows up his award-winning debut WOLFY with three skilfully intertwined, shockingly immediate tales of existential loss and mourning. “What’s the point of finding love,” Grishka asks a priest, “if you’re only going to lose it again?” Yet LIVING is more than a film about death: it shows what it means to live and to love in the awareness that death comes to us all.