Miroslav Slaboshpitsky’s audacious feature debut masters visual storytelling without a single utterance.

Told solely through sign language, and containing no spoken dialogue or subtitles, The Tribe breeds new and unpretentious modes of viewing – applying near-forgotten cinematic structures to amplify the sheer intensity of its silently confrontational reality.

The Tribe also offers technically outstanding formal practices in lieu of its essentially absent written voice. Long, convoluted takes populate the film’s banal and simply framed inner narrative. Though The Tribe may appear dispassionate in its initial construction, subtle alignment is systematically and subtly applied, somehow maintaining  intimacy from a distance.

Miroslav Slaboshpitsky’s The Tribe is one of the most innovative and compelling works of 2014. 

RATING: 5/5

INFORMATION

CAST: Grigoriy Fesenko, Yana Novikova, Rosa Babiy

DIRECTOR: Miroslav Slaboshpitsky

WRITERS: Miroslav Slaboshpitsky

SYNOPSIS: A deaf-mute boarding school plays host to a multitude of criminal enterprises.