The Tribe

Sergey arrives at a boarding school for deaf students and quickly learns how the place actually works: a hierarchy run by the pupils, extortion, theft, and girls sold to lorry drivers at a highway stop. The adults are either absent or in on it. The entire film is in Ukrainian sign language. There is no speech, no narration, no subtitles, and not one scene stops to tell you what was just said. Myroslav Slaboshpytskyi treats this as a way of watching rather than an obstacle: you read the speed of a gesture, the set of a body, the temperature of a room. The first ten minutes are hard, then the language opens. It is shot in long unbroken takes, and the violence is staged the same way, without cutting away, which makes several passages genuinely difficult. It won the grand prize of Critics' Week at Cannes in 2014. Who it is for: viewers open to formal experiment and harsh realism. Who it is not for: anyone who avoids heavy violence and distressing scenes.