Spivaye Ivano-Frankivskteplokomunenergo
Nadia Parfan
Ukraine | 2019 | 63 min
World premiere
Language : Ukrainian
Subtitles : English, French
Having arrived in a rattling bus, the singers of the TeploKomunEnergo company choir climb shambolically onto a small stage. Suddenly, everything falls into place. The women line up in the front row, the men stand, perched on a bench, in the second… The songs are sung out confidently, with a certain pride. This first scene recounts the strangely outmoded world of the company that manages the central heating for the town of Ivano-Frankivsk: there are circuits full of air, leaks in most of the apartment blocks, everyone has a good excuse not to attend the union meetings or choir practice, but it all seems to work! The filmmaker, Nadia Parfan, approaches the life of TeploKomunEnergo in efficient, precise and sharp direct cinema. Via this story of a heating system, under pressure and difficult to control, she observes a modern Ukraine whose social structures, though obsolete and incompatible with the current economic system, paradoxically continue to function.
Madeline Robert