This story tells about a world of different drama that we live with an artist aspiring from childhood to get out of fame and light. That story began in 1941, when an ambitious 16-year-old artist and her family were deported to Siberia. In that difficult period it seems that Stalin's brutal dismantling of the Baltic region was possible, but perhaps that did not change anything. In the end, events change as the girl's ambition turns to life again and breaks the rules of history that he stood up to challenge.
Markevicius and Jones find meaning in the small moments of humanity within the horrors of war - those times when the oppressed and even the oppressors get a chance, just for a little while, to be people.
The script and direction ... [are] dealing with actual historical atrocities and tragedies, and distilling them into another resilience-of-the-human-spirit bromide.
In a tale that is at once overexplained and undercooked, there's almost no trace of recognizable humanity. So even when we are shown truly disturbing images, we are so far removed from them that they are stripped of any real emotive weight.
Sometimes only a fine line separates tragic sweep from a movie that never comes to life as anything other than actors dressed in costumes, straining to inhabit an alien chapter of history.
Filmmakers never seem to run out of footnotes to history during World War II. This one is better served in the pages of a novel. It doesn't work on film.
