Yelizar Nazarenko and Udo Samel in
Rival
Children are known for deconstructing the world with the pure, enigmatic and imaginative force of their gaze, which can never be wholly captured on camera due to a boundary-defying eagerness to understand and capture the world. And it’s a 9-year-old boy named Roman (
Yelizar Nazarenko) who is placed centre stage in
Rival, a movie screening in Competition at the 2021 Bergamo Film Meeting which sees the child leave his rural village in the Ukraine, upon his grandmother’s death, to join his mother Oksana (
Maria Bruni) in the German city where she works illegally.
28/04/2021 - The second feature film by Germany’s Marcus Lenz observes the dynamics which take hold between Europeans and immigrants through the innocent eyes of a Ukrainian child