Gamer / Hamer

Koss lives in a provincial city (easily recognizable as Simferopol, the Crimean capital, which you rarely see in “big” movies) and spends all his time on computer games. He sees himself as a skilled esports player and is preparing to participate in the World Championship. Koss has no friends—although he does have “like-minded individuals” and even fans; he is also willing to sacrifice his relationship with his mother for the sake of his life’s work. But is a life dedicated solely to gaming sustainable?

The dry, sharp conciseness of Gamer  affected its first festival audiences back in 2012: its style, which subtly contrasted with the established standard of post-Soviet low-budget realism, clearly reflected the distinctive, vivid character of the author. Its director, Sentsov, easily and organically found his place in cinema, having, like his character Koss, devoted many years to e-sports. The striking authenticity of the on-screen world is a key feature of Gamer, ensuring that beneath the absence of evaluations or extensive motivations lies a belief in the intrinsic value and unconditional moral weight of the protagonist’s life choices, as well as those of his peers.

Sentsov’s work, loosely connected with film trends (except perhaps for a certain unconscious orientation towards the Soviet cinema of the Stagnation period), is more literary in nature. In light of this fact, it is logical that Sentsov’s bibliography is currently much larger than his filmography, although the actual reason for this is his five-year political imprisonment in a Russian penal colony. Of course, in genre terms, Gamer is not a novel but a short story; an example of cinematic short form, a model of self-control and awareness of one’s own experience and limits, which year by year gave his real life — not the festival life — greater scale.