My Joy

A lorry driver sets out. He is stopped at a checkpoint, changes his route, then has to spend the night in a village. In the morning his lorry is gone and he has lost his memory. From there the film leaves him for other people and jumps at intervals to the war years. The subject is not the journey but violence accumulating in one place. Everything in the film happens in the same region and the same behaviour repeats from the forties to the present; the narration offers no cause and only shows the continuity. The form is deliberately scattered. The main character disappears, new people open up and some of them do not return. Long takes and a still camera are used, while the violence arrives suddenly and without explanation. It is Sergei Loznitsa's first fiction film. He had been making documentaries until then, and the observational gaze comes straight from that. It competed at Cannes in 2010 and drew a sharp reaction in Russia, where it was said to present the country as unrelievedly dark. Vlad Ivanov and Olga Shuvalova are in the cast. Who it is for: viewers who like hard Eastern European cinema and observational narration. Who it is not for: anyone who wants connections made; the film abandons its story on purpose and explains nothing.