The tension in Alexei Fedorchenko’s Silent Souls resolves around the death of the wife of a director of a paper factory in the equally remote former Finnish enclave that became part of Russia under Ivan the Terrible.
The distraught director asks a friend to accompany him with the body to the lakeside where the couple spent their honeymoon. There, they burn the body on the shore, lighting the wood with bottles of the local vodka.
The film, which suggests that local Merjan folk customs still survive in a region that was once prosperous, is beautifully paced and ravishingly shot. It can truly be called poetry on film while in no way seeming pretentious or striving for effect. It’s the story of one man doing what he can to help the other survive a bereavement which, however, contains a surprising secret.
Silent Souls
