The Tribe
Director: Miroslav Slaboshpitsky
Talent: Grigoriy Fesenko, Yana Novikova, Rosa Babiy, Alexander Dsiadevich
Release Date: 15th May 2015
Set in a bleak, run-down institutional school, The Tribe sees its adolescent students engage in prostitution, burglary, ultra-violence and extortion to make a quick buck, inside and out of the confines of its walls. It’s the sort of film that, for its amorality and graphic content, will be eagerly watched and passed around by hormonal teenagers in the real world, in the vein of an Irréversible or Aftermath. It’s also entirely in sign language, without any subtitles.
For the sign language illiterate, the experience is engrossing. You have to work out what’s going on in any given scene through observation, context and deduction, a process as natural as it is rewarding. Everything takes place against a backdrop of eerie silence, without any musical soundtrack, as the humming of lights, clanking of pipes and whirring of engines creates a banal but somehow heightened sense of foreboding. An unusual and often quite disturbing film.
Words: Oisín Murphy-Hall
