My Thoughts Are Silent / Moi dumky tykhi

Vadym leaves the Zakarpattia region and moves to Kyiv, the capital of Ukraine, to build a career as a sound engineer. But what he really wants is to make a lot of money and emigrate to Canada. To make his dream a possibility, the “eternal kid” Vadym gets a freelancing gig to record the voices of rare Ukrainian animals for the video game “Noah’s Ark,” developed by a client from the Ukrainian diaspora. A journey through the wilderness of his homeland near the Hungarian border turns into an examination of his relationship with his native land and, unexpectedly, with someone he is closest to: his energetic, temperamental mother, who joins him on his journey.

Antonio Lukich, a graduate of Karpenko-Karyi Kyiv University, based his first full-length comedy on real life events. It all started after a chat with a friend who had been chasing various animals in the Cherkasy region with a microphone trying to record their sounds. The concept gradually expanded through a series of sketch scenes in the spirit of modern American cringe comedy. However, the director was also influenced by Twin Peaks by David Lynch, the works of Jim Jarmusch, and Soviet “cinema education”. This film ended up being the debut for almost the entire film crew, including the lead actor, Andrii Lidahovskyi. The only well-known name in the film at the time of its making was Irma Vitovska. The movie became an overnight success and was highly praised by critics, collecting a generous harvest of awards from Ukrainian film festivals. The film became a rising star in the young sky of Ukrainian “indie” films (as per the film’s style, not the economic model) and exploded like a supernova.

Not shying away from the populism inherent in Ukrainian “spectator” cinema, Lukich bet on a new target audience — people like himself — freelancers, dreamers, “losers” from the creative class, and internal migrants. This is perhaps the first film of Ukrainian cinema in the 2010s that quickly gained an audience due to word of mouth and turned into a well known example of domestic pop culture that avoids becoming the “embarrassing kind.” This light and witty movie has already gone down in the history of Ukrainian cinema as an imprint of the cultural codes of the next “lost generation.” And Irma Vitovska’s amazing performance in the main female role will probably be included in all textbooks: primarily thanks to the actress, the film was able to claim the status as the Long Farewells of the smartphone era.