A war torn dystopian future? Depending where you are that reality might becoming a reality, to some might be already here. It’s the setting for Ukrainian Dystopian drama Atlantis and today thanks to Grasshopper Films we get a look at their official Trailer.
Valentyn Vasyanovych’s directorial feature debut finds us a few years in the future, Ukraine 2025. War torn Donbass part of the country, we follow a soldier with PTSD attempting to find a new life. He befriends a young female volunteer whom is attempting to restore trying to work towards an peaceful environment.
The film came with a big reputation from Venice and Toronto Film Festivals with awards and rave review reviews. So when it came to UK and Glasgow Film Festival (March 2020) I had big hopes for this film. Sadly I was severely disappointed, after such a positive start and after 30 minutes I was left wondering what the film actually about. Regardless of if I enjoyed the film or not I don’t like walk outs and sadly the full screen was only a third full by the film’s end.
Maybe it needs a second watch, this film is Ukraine’s foreign film entry for the Next Oscars…
A debut of remarkable formal precision, Valentyn Vasyanovych’s Atlantis is an urgent yet highly controlled dispatch from the wartorn Donbass in Eastern Ukraine. Set five years into the future, this all-too-real dystopia uses a series of distanced, compositionally rigorous frames to follow Sergiy, a Ukrainian soldier suffering from PTSD as he tries to restart his life amidst these scourged, uninhabitable lands. Rather than foreground the in-the-moment battle between Russia and Ukraine, Vasyanovych instead powerfully depicts the inevitable aftermath, marked by economic and ecological degradation. Yet somehow, through a new volunteer job exhuming the dead, Sergey finds an unexpected path back to humanity.
The film stars Andriy Rymaruk, Liudmyla Bileka, and Vasyl Antoniak.
There’s no word of this film will get an UK release. The above trailer is the U.S Trailer and Atlantis will get an limited cinema release from 22nd January 2021.
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