Perla
Set during the '80s, the film follows Perla, a young slovakian painter, lives in Austria with her teenager daughter Julia, who is also pursuing an artistic career as a pianist. Settled in with an austrian divorcee, the newly built life of the two women is shaken by a phone call: Julia's father appears to be terminally ill, and would like the two of them to visit. The trope of the return to the roots is perhaps the most common to a certain context of east european cinema, to a point that it becomes more and more oversaturated, especially when it comes in relation to the trauma of the Iron Curtain. Perla's journey seems to indicate exactly that, a rediscovery of personal trauma, an uncovering of a subconscious sort of perturbation. As the journey becomes riskier, she insists on remaining, attempting to piece together something that distresses her - while the initial source of the trauma is very clearly presented early on in a single flashback, it becomes even more evident t...