Directed by Ilya Povolotsky • 2023 • Russia

An unnamed father and daughter traverse the empty roads of provincial Russia in a battered old van, eking out a living selling pirated DVDs at the impromptu screenings they mount with an onboard mobile cinema. Ilya Povolotsky’s compellingly strange debut feature reimagines the road movie as a bleakly beautiful fugue, a minimalist odyssey suffused with longing and alienation. Drifting from the sunlit uplands of the Caucasian south to the frostbitten shoreline of the far north, Grace offers oblique exploration of generational conflict, criminality, and the state of modern Russia, while never losing sight of the primacy of the visual, with crystalline long takes that recall Tarkovsky and Sokurov.

GRACE • БЛАЖЬ
Written and directed by Ilya Povolotsky
Cinematography by Nikolai Zheludovich
Music by Zurkas Tepla
Starring: Maria Lukyanova, Gela Chitava

In Russian, Georgian, and Karachay-Balkar with English subtitles