Exclusive screening: No-One by Vladimir and Lev Prudkin

Update: Postponed

NO-ONE is a slow tragedy, knit with empty familial relationships and passionless romantic ties, that unfolds against the backdrop of a political drama.

The plotline of NO-ONE has post-modernist echoes of classical drama – an Othello in the age of quantum mechanics if you may – where the characters have discovered the principle of uncertainty.

While the action moves to the beautiful and languid Crimean peninsula, playing out against a series of idyllic settings of seaside, cliffs and a high-end Crimean sanatorium – all those well-recognised Shakespearean characters seem to flit across the screen – the powerful General, his beautiful wife, her vengeful lover – the General’s own nephew Vlad, and the hapless young beach boy who becomes a casualty in this passionless farce.

Treason, adultery, spying and skeletons in the closet abound. The languid atmosphere of the bored and banal bedside encounters of the rich and spoiled Russian elite, embodied by the General’s wife Tamara and Vlad’s beautiful girlfriend Zina, their shameless summer resort.

The narrative is a solid well-knit chronicle of the collapse of every character in the film – no one in the film reveals any normal emotion of love, jealousy or passion. The characters are buffeted by events, behaving in an illogical and erratic manner driven by inscrutable motivations.