29 July, 2013 | By Martin Blaney, Screendaily
Rural Russian film takes top prize at Poland’s New Horizons International Film Festival.
Not all of the many women featured in Alexey Fedorchenko’s film are actually married, though all of them aspire to this status, and none of them is really celestial…delightfully earthy would be a much better definition. But they all belong to that same remote Mari, a Volga-Finnic people living in the north of Russia that no one really heard of before Fedorchenko’s previous feature, the darkly poeticalSilent Souls, a hit at Venice two years ago and which walked away with glowing reviews and several awards…
Fedorchenko must have had fun all these short stories, changing styles as he moves from one female character to the next, suggesting a different genre for every episode and keeping it all brief and tight, sometimes even too tight for its own good. A one shot episode of a man’s love declaration done over the naked belly of his beloved, while there is an almost mystical tale of a country bumpkin who is duly punished for discovering that the sorceress he was asking for help was not the daughter but the wife of the wind.
13 November, 2012 | By Dan Fainaru, Screendaily