tough to find words for a film that gets so close to his subjects, so intimate, so distanceless, so honest & raw - that you can feel every bit of blood boiling in the filmmaker's veins. a whole family of addiction & substance abuse is portrayed. a whole circle of a genetic & environmental catastrophe. people drinking themselves slowly towards death, and you become their witness of para-suicidal behavior. director Pepa Lubojacki now - a young film student out of the FAMU film school in Prague - is daughter, sister, cousin to them, and has her own issues that she's not hiding or sugarcoating. they become integral part of the film as well. it's an relentless, unsanitized, veritable gaze into the abyss you won't be able to shook off, unless you flee into cynicism. she's using synthie sounds from free internet libraries that bounce, graphically intertitles that reflect her thoughts, and most importantly AI to let the people in her family photographs speak (plus a pigeon in a meme - yes, this film is very funny at times as well). Using AI is a tricky thing nowadays but here it creates a creepy & eerie counterpart to the extremely close, sometimes hard to digest moments of authenticity, which makes perfect sense. in fact all of those artificial methods seem desperately looking to create a distance not achievable. the frantic use of them just become another level of heartbreak. there's this feeling of "isn't this too much oversharing?" - some critics would call it misery porn on steroids - a self-acceleration & self-application that might make you blush a little here & there, especially in the rather didactic (the explanation of addiction) or esoteric ("let's practice raw honesty!") bits. I'd argue though this is an extremely cynical point of view in the face of the reality the protagonist & director is facing, having found an artistic vehicle to filter the immense pain she's having to endure. you'll become part of it through her eminently creative process. a wonderful, small yet so impactful gem.
