Yuri's Day

Lyubov, an opera singer, shows her son her ancestral home, a remote village covered in deep snow. She is saying farewell to this place, because she intends to take her career abroad, to Germany or Switzerland. But after a visit to an old monastery, her son disappears. He doesn't return that evening, nor in the following days. Lyubov, a beautiful, successful, self-confident and even self-important woman, grows nervous, anxious and hysterical, progressing over the following days and weeks almost into madness. It's the psychologically understandable reaction of a mother desperate to find her missing child. A Western psychological drama would have ended here, after having presented a more or less credible explanation for the boy's disappearance. But for Kirill Serebrennikov, this is merely a prelude to another, very different story — that of a woman who slowly loses her identity... Klaus Eder, Fipresci, Sochi 2008