Genre: Romantic Melodrama
Duration: 105mins
Director: Valery Todorovsky
Cast: Chulpan Khamatova, Dina Korzun, Maksim Sukhanov

Valeri Todorovsky’s fourth film was the winner of SIFF’s New Director Showcase Competition and is set in a post glasnost Moscow and is a poignant testimonial to the power of love and survival amongst this capital citie’s chaos.  Rita’s boyfriend Alyosha has a gambling problem and a seemingly huge debt with the casino. Rita is held as collateral while Alyosha slips out to raise the money he owes. As Rita slowly starts to regret her decision to try and help she meets Yaya, a stripper who turns out to be deaf but more than willing to let Rita into her world and help her with her problems. Yaya starts to teach Rita sign language and eventually falls in love with her. The two soon embark upon an adventure to make enough money to pay back the debt. They encounter deaf gangsters and dreams of a new world, a Land of The Deaf, a place by the sea where everyone is nice and the girls can live happily ever after. This film is about loneliness, love and hate, told through the life of a deaf girl in Moscow.

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