Anna Yanovskaya: Ten Centimeters of Life
First an explanation of the title of the film, enigmatic and fascinating it is: It refers to the ten centimeters of space below the ceiling where there was no water… the space that saved lives at the unbelievable dramatic flood tragedy in the Krasnodar region near the Black Sea in Russia, in July 2012, an event that killed up to 200 people and left thousands homeless.
However, it is not statistics that interests the debutant director Anna Yanovskaya, it is the human dimension. She is using some archive material from 2012 – some shot via a cell phone from a roof top – to frame the visits she made to the city of Krymsk, where people more than one year after remember it all, while trying to rebuild their lives. The director uses a first person narrative, she is sometimes in the picture, ”I was in the epicenter of grief”, yes this is what it is about in a film that includes moving scenes of deep deep pain but also demonstrates the human being’s will to go on…
A grandmother is in focus. Her grandson comes home from military service, the family gathers around the table, singing and drinking, drinking and singing, a wonderful typical Russian gathering, there is a tone and an atmosphere in these scenes – but the conversations keep on going back to what happened in July 2012. There is a lot of anger towards the authorities, ”they did nothing”, we see a mother holding a picture of her small son, a picture taken two hours before he disappeared, unbearable, as is the archive footage showing a man swimming, trying to grap a pipe, ”hold on”, they scream to him, but he can not, he is taken by the water and we are told that he did not make it, he drowned. A young man from the municipality (I guess) goes around to visit to see how the reconstruction is progressing. His meetings with old couples are caught by the camera, sweet bitterness.
Grandma is sitting outside her house, you read her face, grief but also survival will… a fine work, this is, personal, terrifying theme, maybe sometimes a bit messy in structure, still, the most important is that the director brings the viewer into the souls and minds of those who suffered and still do so.
Russia, 2014, 66 mins.
The film was in the national competition at the
