Sofia’s review published on Letterboxd:
Part I : Words.
I nearly took a vow of silence like you. But this heavenly beauty merits words. A young monk shackled by spiritual duty, striving for salvation in the crux of political turmoil, despairing over a haunted love for an Albanian fugitive accused of murder. Theirs is a tale unravelling in a fragmented land, where hostility and heartache are caught in a perpetual struggle, where love and war reveal gaps and chasms both in the psyche and the earth. A sequence of silence, sacrifice, slaughter.
Part II : Faces.
You’re really serious aren’t you? Like death. A disillusioned war photographer grapples with an anxious love, hoping and despairing in his struggle to fuse two worlds in polar opposition. His is a world of instability, hostility, violence and blood; hers is one conveniently cut off from all the horrors of reality, though she assumes a clarity and awareness in resistance to the societal delusions and facades she threatens to be consumed by. A narrative of deceit, denial, death.
Part III : Pictures.
Will these hands ne’er be clean? The war photographer returns to his native village, thrust into political divisions and untethered relations of the past, gathering up the threads of unrealised love and hostility into something a little less tangled, a little less fraught with aggression and distance. To stop or not to stop? Full stop. He reaches out, responding to an inner compulsion to smooth the threads, but blood is in the air. It should rain. Now the world’s watching a circus. You know what? You’re crazy too. Correct, i’m still here in this asylum. A rumination on return, ruin. And at last, the rain.
Time never dies. The circle is not round.