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Being a single mom and a successful painter is already a tough act to maintain. But doing so as an exile who escaped the Soviet bloc and suffered deep trauma for doing so, is even more distressing — especially when your past comes back to haunt you.

Such are the burdens faced by Perla, the titular heroine of Alexandra Makarova’s promising second feature, which screened in Karlovy Vary after premiering at Rotterdam back in January. Stark and tense, with an impressive eye for period detail, the film is at once a portrait of a rebellious female artist and a time capsule revealing lives torn apart by the Iron Curtain only a decade before it lifted.

Like a cross between Joanna Hogg’s The Souvenir and Pawel Pawlikowski’s Cold War, Perla shuffles between scenes of postmodern artistic creation and Soviet-era political strife, focusing on a Slovakian painter (Rebeka Polakova) trying to raise her daughter,...

Alexandra Makarová’s “Perla” (2025) maps an emotionally fraught journey from stability to disruption. What does it take for someone to wilfully jumble their life? How do purpose, and self-definition rearrange themselves when the foregone resurfaces, pleading readmission? Opening in 1981 Vienna, the film follows the eponymous character played by Rebeka Poláková, a single mother straining to raise her daughter Julia. Perla is an artist so she barely has any resources to fall on. Julia suggests she take up a cleaning job, but Perla instantly dismisses such an idea. Good luck pops up for her when she encounters Josef (Simon Schwarz) at an exhibition and the two fall in love.

Josef has no scruples in quitting the relationship he was in when he met Perla. He accepts Julia as his own daughter, watching out for her at times that supersede the caring attentiveness of Perla herself. Josef has Austrian citizenship and is financially secure,...

Dubai-based sales agent Cercamon has boarded “Perla” ahead of its premiere at International Film Festival Rotterdam in the Tiger Competition.

Directed by Alexandra Makarová, it focuses on a painter who – after fleeing Communist Czechoslovakia – lives in 1980s Vienna with her new partner Josef and teenage daughter Julia. But when Julia’s father contacts her, Perla decides to cross the border again – and risk everything she has built.

“I come from a family of refugees who fled Russia after the October Revolution. Ours is a tragic story. There’ve always been conversations about concentration camps, hunger and missing father figures,” Makarová told Variety.

“My mother is a painter as well and I was mostly inspired by the women in my family. They were always left alone with the children, raising them while still trying to follow their dreams.”

In her film, Makarová decided to show a mother who challenges societal expectations.