Kitoboy

Unless you are completely hooked on Hollywood blockbusters, do yourself a favour and watch this movie. With a fraction of a fraction of the budget of a Hollywood movie, this gem managed to totally captivate me throughout. It introduced me to a part of our planet I know almost nothing about. It is elegiac, but also hopeful. It increasingly made me feel deep empathy for its central character, without him ever saying much. It features outstanding cinematography (the collection of candlelight scenes during the power-cut radiate enormous warmth and humanity) and a most surprising soundtrack. And the last five minutes are some of the best I ever watched in a movie. What more could one want ! (Thank you to the WOW Festival 2021 for screening this)

I can't believe reviews! Did I watch an another movie? Cause Kitoboy is so so bad. Scenario is so bad. Dialogues are bad. No acting. No music (just one really bad song) It's so boring and totally meaningless. Waste of time. I hate it.

There's not much here about whaling, but then there's not much about anything else either. You could almost believe that a dimwitted inarticulate village boy would become fixated on an internet fantasy, given how empty and boring all the "real life" scenes are. Anyway, that provides the trigger for a minimal bit of plot where he wanders off for a while and nothing happens. There's not much dialog, but what there is is filled with long pauses and staring into space, and almost every shot is drawn out and over-extended, seemingly just to lengthen the film. It does succeed, though, in portraying the mind-numbing tedium of a rural Russian backwater, so two stars for that.

One of the best films out of venice and my personal favorite. The film has an impressive mise en image and mise en scene, blends documentary and fiction filmmaking while constantly engaging the audience through the characters and the absurdity of the story. From all of the films I've seen in Venice and considering that I was part of the Giornate degli Autori Jury this year, and that this was our choice, I would say that "The Whaler Boy" is one of the most ambitious films I've seen in a long long time. It will take you by the hand the minute it starts with a purely magical first shot and the joyous yet melancholic ending.

Summary

This wonderful and moving story about a young whale hunter and his community in the confines of eastern Siberia, goes from naturalistic realism to fable, combines the coming of age with the social portrait, exhibits the right doses of tenderness and poetry and he sports a sobriety that preserves him from any maudlin overflow.

Review

Leshka (Vladimir Onokhov) is a Chukchi teenager who lives in a coastal town on the Bering Strait, in the autonomous region of Chukotka (Russian Federation), in the confines of eastern Siberia. The villagers are engaged in harpoon whaling. From the moment Leshka sees an American cam girl online and he falls in love with her, her life takes an decisive turn.

Leshka lives with his grandfather and rides a motorcycle with his friend across the endless tundra. He participates in hunting parties (of a documentary realism) and does not do many more in that poor community, with a desolate environment, geographically isolated and inhabited mainly by men. A community with a limited but supportive future and with the very close horizon of American Alaska. Perhaps Leshka's dream encounter is a necessary chimera to leave his community behind.

(Let us add as a side note that the Chukchi ethnic group is the most related to that of the original American peoples.)

This first feature film by Philipp Yuryev (scripted by him) admirably combines a wide variety of registers and genres: comedy, naturalistic drama, coming of age, social portraiture and fable and even adventure story. The same diversity is appreciated in the cinematographic narrative: in prolonged scenes, with or without fixed, intimate shots or in the desolate immensity of the tundra (admirably photographed), there are series of short scenes that erupt without transitions and with abrupt changes of scenery or others of extreme agitation. To all this is added an incredible soundtrack.

In short, a wonderful and moving story that goes from naturalistic realism to fable, which combines the coming age with the social portrait, which exhibits the right doses of tenderness and poetry and which is safe from any sentimental overflow thanks to its sobriety.