How is it possible to feel someone elses pain? The hero of this film is an autistic boy. His life is divided between an apartment with peeling walls on the outskirts of a large city, and a mental hospital. Anton comes into the frame when he is on the point of becoming a patient at a residential neuropsychiatric institution, a place where people with the sort of diagnosis that he has do not live long. The author, the camera, the hero. The distance between them shrinks with every passing minute, and the author has to enter the shot and become a character in the story. However, it is not a story about how one person helped another, but about how one person recognized herself in another. About how there is Another who lives in each of us and must be destroyed every day inside of us in order to survive.
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Ukrainian actress, producer and director Lyubov Arkus' debut documentary feature which she wrote, premiered Out of competition at the 69th Venice Film Festival in 2012, was shot on location in Russia and is a Russian production which was produced by producers Konstantin Sjavlovski, Sergej Seljanov and Alexandr Golutva. It tells the story about an adolescent boy diagnosed with autism named Anton Kharatonin who lives with his mother named Rinata in Saint Petersburg, Russia. Rinata has taken care of her son for many years, but then she becomes incurably ill and her principal concern is that her own son might be sent off to a psychiatric clinic. Subtly and finely directed by Ukrainian filmmaker Lyubov Arkus, this quietly paced and biographical documentary feature which is narrated by the director and from multiple viewpoints, draws a profoundly humane and intimate portrayal of a mother and father's relationship with their son and a filmmaker's relationship with a person who lives in-between his own and the real world and who though appearing and disappearing from the camera finds his way into the heart of her documentary. While notable for its naturalistic and atmospheric milieu depictions, fine cinematography by cinematographer Alisher Khamidkhodzjaev and use of sound, this gripping portrait which follows four years in the life of a human being who makes quite an impact on the people he spends time with, asks pivotal questions about human dignity. This life-affirming, humorous and heartrending story where interviews with Anton Kharitonov's mother and father, psychiatrists, a lawyer and many other people who spent time working with and observing Anton, is impelled and reinforced by its cogent narrative structure, illuminating voice-over narration, Anton's presence and writings, the director's presence and the admirable efforts that a filmmaker and her collaborator's make to secure the future of an individual who might end up spending the rest of his life in a mental institution. A compassionate, lyrical and graceful documentary feature which rightfully focuses more on the humane then the cinematic aspects.
