News

DVD Release Date: March 13, 2012

Price: DVD $29.95

Studio: Kino Lorber

Viktor Nemets (r.) tries to get a grip in My Joy.

The drama My Joy is the first fiction film directed by acclaimed Russian documentary filmmaker Sergei Loznitsa.

A parable of post-Communist Russia, the 2010 movie weaves the tale of a truck driver Georgy (Viktor Nemets) who sets out on a provincial Russian highway for a routine delivery, but finds his journey spiraling out of control following a series of chance encounters. A roadside police check, a talkative war veteran, and a too-young prostitute lead him to a village from which there appears to be no way out – where the locals struggle to survive a tough, elemental world, and the past holds a vise-like grip over their everyday lives. Caught in this dead end, Georgy soon approaches a fate that is as strange as it is unexpected.

Based on true stories the...

Director: Sergei Loznitsa Writer: Sergei Loznitsa Starring: Viktor Nemets, Vladimir Golovin, Olga Shuvalova, Dmitriy Gotsdiner, Aleksey Vertkov A prologue reveals a lifeless human body as it is tossed into a hole and promptly buried in cement and dirt. With this short opening sequence it becomes bitingly obvious that the joyful title of Russian writer-director Sergei Loznitsa's film is intended to reek of cynicism and irony. Soon thereafter we meet Georgy (Viktor Nemets); he is our truck driving guide across a dilapidated and somewhat foreboding Russian landscape. As if trapped in a surrealist nightmare, Georgy is constantly delayed and/or detoured from delivering his cargo of flour to its destination. This, however, allows the extremely affable Georgy ample opportunity to fraternize with some shady check-point security officers, a couple of mischievous thieves, a teenage prostitute (Olga Shuvalova), and an elderly wanderer (Vladimir Golovin) who hijacks the narrative (ala Wojciech Has...

After admiring the mixing process of cement, two men heartlessly drop a dead body into the vat. The sun shines, a bulldozer covers the hole, and people get on with their workday. Wait a second, Sergei Loznitsa, you don't really mean that title sincerely, do you? With a little more than a decade's worth of documentary filmmaking under his belt, this director loaded his camera for his first narrative feature, "My Joy," and aimed it at Russian society, past and present. Young, fresh-faced Georgy (Viktor Nemets) is our tour guide through the country's locale; truck driver by profession and warm-hearted…...

Michael Atkinson in the Voice on My Joy: "Imagine the early, hellaciously bleak work of Cormac McCarthy transposed to the corrupt outlands of modern Russia and/or Ukraine and composed with a steely psychopath's disregard for cohesion, and you have something like Sergei Loznitsa's debut feature, a two-hour-plus decathlon of evil cross-purposes and runaway iniquity. A documentarian by trade, Loznitsa trusts his camera and distrusts dialogue, just as does his dire landscape's assortment of feral mercenaries, whores, scroungers, and cutthroats."

"After eluding the authorities, à la Stalker, young truck driver Viktor Nemets chooses to head down a forbidden road and embarks on an episodic journey that creeps to the edge of the surreal and supernatural without going over the line." Scott Tobias at the Av Club: "The driver encounters characters who recall troubling incidents in Russia's past and present, including various hitchhikers and vagabonds, as well as an underage prostitute and hostile soldiers.

"My Joy is easy to follow for an hour, then unnecessarily diffuse and possibly objectionable," writes Vadim Rizov for the L. "The basic plot is as follows: Georgy (Viktor Nemets) drives a truck. He gets pulled over by leering cops busy harassing a female driver, skips away while they stare at her ass and eventually ends up in a small town, where he's conked out by locals upset he's merely hauling flour. There's a flashback (hang on), and then he re-emerges, bearded and with a gun, shooting all and sundry. End. There aren't many ways to plausibly interpret this scenario: the end conclusion is that people must die for Russia to live. Specifically, everyone who isn't a good, law-abiding middle-class Russian is probably an untrustworthy piece of shit. Anyway, the law-administering classes (as 90% of emigres will tell you) are the Communist Party rebranded, and the lower classes mainly want to...

Since 1963, The New York Film Festival has continued to bring new and important cinematic works by filmmakers from around the world. The 17-day festival includes the Main Slate selections along with special events, panel discussions, the experimental film showcase, Views from the Avant-Garde, and much more.This year, the 48th edition, brings new films from directors such as David Fincher (The Social Network), Julie Taymor (The Tempest), Abbas Kiarostami (Certified Copy), Mike Leigh (Another Year), Cristi Puiu (Aurora), Oliver Assayas (Carlos), Kelly Reichardt (Meek's Cutoff) and Clint Eastwood (Hereafter).Opening the festival on Friday September 24 is David Fincher's The Social Network, a bio-pic that examines the creation of the pop culture internet phenomenon known as Facebook. The following is a review of that film as well as several others running with the festival.The Social Networkusa 2010Dir: David FincherRating B- 117 minsBelow is an edited version of my review. Click...

#20. My Joy Director: Sergei LoznitsaCast: Viktor Nemets, Vlad Ivanov, Maria Varsami, Vladimir Golovin, Olga Shuvalova, Alexey Vertkov, Yuriy Sviridenko Distributor: Rights Available. Buzz: I'm happy to see Tiff and Nyff programmers include this difficult film among their lineups, cuz if you like "the road less traveled" roadtrip type of movie, then you'll want to venture into documentarian Sergei Loznitsa's first narrative feature -- one of the highlights of my Cannes experience this year that actually got panned -- perhaps because it was so non-conform and psychologically messed up. The Gist: The story about a few days in the life of truck driver Georgi seems to be a never-ending nightmare, a spiral of violence and abuses of power. A man goes to work and on his way he is sucked into the everyday madness of his country, losing his health and memory in the process and ends up as a murderer,...