Hot Docs

“I’m a silly person, but sensitive too,” declares Valya, the 22-year-old single mother who works in a local vodka factory and lives with her mother in the backwoods Russian town of Zhigulyovsk. There’s no future here: there’s nothing to do but drink and all the men are deadbeats. Ambivalent about caring for her son, the comely, heavily mascaraed Valya escapes the brutal banality of her reality by dreaming of becoming an actress in Moscow. But in realizing her dream, she would not only be abandoning her son, she’d be destroying her mother’s: Fifty-year-old Tatiana finally has a chance at love when an old flame re-enters her life. Filmed like fiction and imbued with the gorgeous melancholy of crushed dreams, award-winning Vodka Factory is a stunningly intimate reflection on the price of dreams. Gisèle Gordon

Co-presented with KinoArt Festival.