My Joy

Colour, DCP
Germany, Ukraine, Netherlands, 2010, 127 min
Section: Open Eyes

Synopsis

Truck driver Georgi packs up the lunch his wife has made him and heads out on the road. But encounters with various characters, including a teenage girl who sells her body (and knows the reason why), transform his routine delivery trip into an experience the hero never wanted nor imagined. Can a man maintain his humanity under conditions forcing him to fight for survival? Can a picturesque landscape temper the cruelty that takes place within it? The combination of sheer rationality and poetic absurdity, along with a feeling of powerlessness that takes hold of the viewer (even with the understanding that the truth is elsewhere), nudges the film towards the writings of Ádám Bodor and Franz Kafka. Camerawork by Oleg Mutu (4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days) and evocative sound design by Vladimir Golovnitsky (How I Ended This Summer) helped foster the sense of timelessness in a work the director built out of stories that he himself heard or lived through during his years of traveling across Russia.

About the director

Sergei Loznitsa (b. 1964, Baranovichi, Belarus) grew up in Kiev and graduated from the Kiev Polytechnic Institute with a degree in engineering and mathematics. For several years he worked in the field of expert systems and artificial intelligence. In 1997 he graduated from Moscow’s VGIK film school, then moved on to St. Petersburg to produce his own documentaries, including Portrait (Portret, 2002), which took a Special Jury Mention at KVIFF 2003. Artel won the award for Best Documentary under 30 Minutes at the 2007 Karlovy Vary festival. Others of his films have been awarded at festivals in Oberhausen, Leipzig, and Krakow. Loznitsa has lived in Germany since 2001. My Joy, chosen to compete at Cannes, is the director’s feature debut.