Holy God

Russia has a surfeit of overqualified graduates. Nastya Sokolova is one of them. Her career, if you can call it that, gave her a plethora of unexpected work experiences: from desk slave in banking to head bookkeeper of an illegal brothel. The film’s eight tableaus detail the various workplaces, colleagues and situations. To finish it off: deadpan commentary.

A refrigerator truck with naked bodies of four females is found on the border of Finland. Each of the girls share the same neck tattoo that resembles a house. The identities of the the girls are yet to be found. Three years later, the police arrest Valeria Mazyane, an orphaned girl and a recent Islam convert who lives in Moscow in a Kyrgyz immigrant community. The police believe she killed her husband’s brother. It turns out that Valeria is not an orphan after all, and her past is as mysterious as the man’s murder. And under her wedding hijab, there’s a familiar house tattoo.

After her parents’ divorce, six-year-old Vladlena moves from Crimea to Grozny, not yet aware of the changes that lie ahead. When war breaks out in Chechnya, it deeply affects her city and family. Years later, filmmaker Sandu reflects on her childhood in this poetic, autobiographical hybrid film, exploring how cycles of violence shape children—and how healing and change are possible.

Tamerlane, in order to gain independence and be able to marry his beloved Amina, leaves Grozny for the mountains to work as a shepherd.

“While shooting my feature documentary film, Memory, in April of 2021 in Grozny, Chechnya (the birthplace of my mother and where I grew up), I felt the influence of the gigantic portraits of Putin, Kadyrov Senior and Kadyrov Junior all over the city. They observed me from everywhere. In parallel to the production of the film, we set out to capture the feeling of totalitarianism that these portraits conveyed. We got up at 4 in the morning and shot through the window of a car because such actions put us under threat of persecution. We understood that we were documenting the time of the birth of fascism in Russia.” Vladlena Sandu

An anthology of five stories that can literally happen to anyone.

Mother and daughter, forced migrants from Chechnya who survived the war. Both lost their husbands. Now they live in a small town with the belief that everything will work out.