Pam­fir

This is a cau­tion­ary tale set in the rur­al wilds of Ukraine about how a sur­feit of self-belief can very eas­i­ly come back and bite you on the ass. With great phys­i­cal pow­er, dia­mond-hard fists, and a for­mi­da­ble han­dle­bar mous­tache come a sense of nat­ur­al dom­i­nance – a feel­ing that you can walk between the rain­drops. Olek­san­dr Yat­sen­tyuk plays Leonid, aka Pam­fir (which trans­lates as ​“stone”), a man who pos­sess­es such traits and, through the course of this sto­ry which is packed with hair-trig­ger vio­lence and intense stand-offs, is made to learn of his own essen­tial fallibility.

Pam­fir pays his way by smug­gling con­tra­band across the bor­der, and local politi­co-cum-king­pin Mr Oreste (Petro Chy­chuk) takes a dim view of these activ­i­ties. Some might say a psy­chot­i­cal­ly vio­lent dim view. We join our hero from what appears to have been a place of estrange­ment, where he recon­nects with his dot­ing wife and now-grown son, and acts as if his absence has been no big thing. He also hap­pens to be a crack­shot water divin­er and well dig­ger, so gain­ful, legal employ­ment is there for the taking.

And then things very quick­ly go south, as Pam­fir has to renege on his deci­sion to play it straight when his errant son Nazar (Stanislav Poti­ak) torch­es the local church as a prac­ti­cal joke, and the prodi­gal father feels duty bound to offer remu­ner­a­tion. But then head­ing back to the Old Ways isn’t as easy as it once was now that Oreste and his armed goons have tight­ened their choke­hold on the town. What’s more, every­one is exit­ed about the local car­ni­val where they’ll have a chance to kit them­selves out in ter­ri­fy­ing bone masks and straw out­fits. What could pos­si­bly go wrong?

Dmytro Sukholytkyy-Sobchuk’s feisty and dynam­ic film presents the action through a lens that whisks around its sub­jects, com­pris­ing of long but care­ful­ly chore­o­graphed takes where we wit­ness one event, and then smooth­ly snake off to see anoth­er. There’s a bleak­ness to pro­ceed­ings that’s become some­thing of an under­stand­able trade­mark for films from the region, yet this one is cut through with a seam of mor­dant humour, and the dis­mal prospects for the char­ac­ters are flecked with the pos­si­bil­i­ty that hap­pi­ness is attainable.

Though there is no direct ref­er­ence to the cur­rent siege, you can feel things bub­bling in the back­ground. This tale of a tough lon­er forced to test his met­tle cer­tain­ly has polit­i­cal res­o­nance beyond its inti­mate telling here.

Lit­tle White Lies is com­mit­ted to cham­pi­oning great movies and the tal­ent­ed peo­ple who make them.

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