Balka: Three Stories (2010)
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Reviews: 1 user BALKA is a trilogy of stories about women struggling with drug use and HIV in Ukraine. Through the course of the film we meet Zina and Marina: best friends and active drug users about to ... See full summary » |
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This is a short, intimate documentary encounter with a handful of women who are or have been drug addicts and have contracted HIV.
The film presents a triptych of views of injection drug addition in the Ukraine. Each vignette presents a successive step towards recovery but leaves the image necessarily unresolved and in flux; these are real lives after all and their ultimate trajectories are unknown. On the margins of these three sketches minor characters appear or in some cases fail to appear, adding contextual richness to the stories.
The characters are sketched with poetic clarity and concision, and the filmmakers avoid moralizing, editorializing, glamorizing or exoticizing their subjects. Each character projects a distinct and powerful personality.