The Tribe

Overview

In a lot of respects, Miroslav Slaboshpitsky’s The Tribe seems like the ultimate art film cliche. The winner of no less than three separate awards at last year’s Cannes Film Festival, it’s a grim, slow-moving drama set in a poverty-stricken part of Ukraine, one that employs non-actors and a minimalist aesthetic, and is packed full of explicit and often highly disturbing depictions of youth sexuality and violence.

And yet despite this apparent tidal wave of arthouse affectations, we’d lay odds that you’ve never seen anything quite like it. A stark and strangely mesmerising take on contemporary silent cinema, Slaboshpitsky’s film is performed entirely in sign language. No subtitles. No narration. Not a single, audible word of spoken dialogue.

The film’s title refers to a group of deaf-mute teenagers living in a boarding school in Kiev. With only minimal adult supervision, the school is essentially ruled by a gang of older boys, whose nocturnal activities include robbery, assault and pimping their female classmates at a nearby truck stop. The film begins with the arrival of a new student (played with sullen intensity by Grigoriy Fesenko) and slowly follows his rise through the tribe’s close knit hierarchy – a hierarchy that is threatened when he develops feelings for one of the girls he’s assigned to pimp.

To make what might seem like an obvious disclaimer, The Tribe is not going to appeal to everyone. There’s no shortage of gesticulated dialogue in the movie, but unless you speak Ukrainian sign language, you’re not actually going to be able to understand it. Some viewers will be fascinated; others will probably find it frustrating, pretentious and dull. On an entirely separate wavelength are the people who might be intrigued by the film in theory, only to be (justifiably) upset by its unremitting bleakness. Regardless of how much you admire the end result, no one would deny that this is a brutally unpleasant picture; one capable of making even the most hardened of cinephiles writhe in visceral discomfort.

Still, for anyone interested in the language of filmmaking itself, The Tribe is a movie that simply demands to be seen. Each new sequence provides another intricate puzzle, as Slaboshpitsky forces viewers to search for visual and contextual clues in order to discern the meaning of silent conversations. Long, roaming Steadicam shots draw you deeper and deeper into the lives of his characters, even as a quiet cacophony of background noise (footsteps, heavy breathing, punches and slaps) makes the film seem almost otherworldly. Remarkably though, the absence of dialogue never becomes anaesthetising. If anything, it makes the horror feel all the more real.

The Tribe screens four times at ACMI over two weekends. For more information and session times, see the ACMI website.