Today I have attended my first film from the San Francisco International Film Festival this season. I can openly say that it had a good start for me. I saw a Russian film called “Silent Souls”, or “Ovsyanki”, by director Aleksei Fedorchenko. The filmed started out rather dark and lengthy focusing on the burial of a woman by her husband and his coworker in accordance to the Merja people rituals. The close-ups of the naked body being washed then burned by the river, the talks of the past sexual intercourse with the woman who’s ashes are about to be committed to the waters, the seeming simplicity with which people deal with death in this Volga region of Russia – all astonish and repel at first. However, once you get past the shock factor and let yourself surrender to the film, you become enamored with its gentle sensuality and painful lyricism, its poetry of life and love. The movie touches on many topics that rarely lurk in the souls of the modern urban dwellers – those of the abandonment of the small provincial towns and the loneliness associated with those who have left them never to return, the loss of the entire peoples and their cultural identity. “Silent Souls” opens your mind to certain philosophical outlooks that despite the open darkness of the film’s plot make you leave the theater with lifted spirits and love for those around you.
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