A hot tip at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, Myroslav Slaboshpytskiy’s audacious, confident debut is a ‘an innovative rethinking of cinema’s language of sight and sound’ (Jonathan Romney).
Featuring a cast of young deaf actors, it’s set in a boarding school for the deaf, where new arrival Sergey (Grigoriy Fesenko) is quickly drawn into a world of institutionalised theft and prostitution.
But, assigned to Anna (Yana Novikova) as her pimp, he falls in love with her; a grievous mistake in a world with exceptionally unforgiving rules.
With explicit scenes of both sex and violence, The Tribe is a fiercely original and brilliantly executed debut, and Slaboshpytskiy a real discovery.