From the outset the film is slow and looking for tension: the camera work achieves the mood very well. The shots of the Volga are beautiful.A man's wife dies, and he calls a friend to help bring her body to the lake where they had their honeymoon and to burn her body on the lake in their ancestral tradition.The real drawback of the film is the dialogue - nobody speaks like that!!! The dialogue is strained and extremely formal - so much so that it is comical - which loses the pace and tension. This is unfortunate, since the film otherwise communicates very well the brutality of the ancient pagan world view.

Somewhere up north in Scandinavia a young woman dies. Her husband wants to cremate her, following the rites of the land he lives in. One of his workers comes with him and together they start on a road trip through life itself.A short introduction is used to define the world of the film - a desolate town in the middle of nowhere that is filled to the rim with people that follow a somewhat strange set of rites and rulings, but that are perfectly happy with them. The main theme in their life is a large river that flows through their country and that is more or less the base of their lives.As it starts rolling it is mostly just two players working their ways around each other, portraying their odd lives with perfection. The story is amazing, the way they go through it is maddening and reminding of a lot of other strange road trips. The Straight Story and Cargo 200 come to mind. It has some fleeting moments where the pace drops to a stand still though and thus it isn't entirely satisfactory. It's good, but not very good.7 out of 10 bottles of vodka

I saw this film 8 hours ago on a big screen and I'm still spelled.The camera work was very precise and poetic just as the structure of the story line and acting. This movie is very slow, yet very intense. Every scene generates so much thought in the viewer and leaves room for imagination, so that after the first few scenes my mind was swinging in the shamanic rhythm of the movie. I actually saw some older people lightly dandling themselves in that rhythm.It's much more than just a story of a nation that is disappearing. It is a story of all the human culture and the mortality of it. The mortality of our beloved paradigms. Yet this film looked at life from the brighter side. Everything disappears, but so what? Nothing lasts, but nothing is lost.

Started as typical Iranian movie, then forget to gain the momentum and after express straying finished as typical Scandinavian movie. It seems like an attempt to create the film about instinct tribe in the instinct or spoofed film-making tradition. But I think I can explain it's festival popularity. Since those talks about sex are still considered as ambiguous and vulgar, "Sex in the city" have no perspective as festival movie, but when you have filmed the tribe that have such age-old tradition, and this tradition is also packed into sacramental funeral ritual, you get an highest level indulgence and also you can redistribute this indulgence between all those highbrowed festival critics. I want that the story would be continued and the Russian "central region" get such get deep developed mythology. More better then hobbit village in the NZ.