The Tribe / Plemia

A boy named Serhiy arrives at a boarding school for the hearing impaired and immediately becomes entangled with the members of a criminal organization called the ‘Tribe,’ which includes the residents of the boarding school and a labor teacher. After he passes a series of initiation tests, Serhiy is accepted by the gang and is soon assigned to be the pimp of another student Ani, a prostitute. The boy falls in love with her and tries to save her from a life of sex slavery.

The screenplay is based on the director’s own experiences. As a child, Myroslav Slaboshpytskyi attended  School #186 in Kyiv, located across the street from a boarding school for hearing-impaired children. The students of the two schools would often engage in brawls with each other. In 2010, Slaboshpytskyi for the first time raised the theme of hearing-impaired youth in his short film Hlukhota / Deafness. It premiered at the Berlin Film Festival and became a foundation of the director’s feature film debut.

The Tribe masterfully continues the tradition of Eastern European festival films of the 2000s, as the director was undoubtedly influenced by iconic films of Romanian, Hungarian and other schools of cinema while adding his own experience and views on film.

The film finally premiered in the Critics’ Week program of the Cannes Festival, where it won three awards. The Tribe went on to be shown at dozens of prestigious film festivals, and the film was also included in numerous lists of the best films of the year. Among others, it occupied eighth place in the Annual Top Publication by Sight & Sound, and became one of the most influential and most discussed films in the recent history of Ukrainian cinema.

Perhaps the most notable feature of the film is that it is exclusively in sign language. Several Ukrainian critics described it as a silent film that is an innovative work of Ukrainian cinema.