JA I FELIKS

Tymophiy lives together with his mother and grandmother in a pretty if somewhat cramped apartment. One day his grandma brings the ageing war veteran Felix back from a drinking tour and shortly afterwards the quirky old man moves in. What initially seems doomed to be a misadventure soon turns out to be the source of the boy’s first deep friendship as well as that of a substitute father who prepares him for the harsh adult world. And yet the radicalism with which Felix goes about life, which is at times interspersed with brutal violence, and his nightly panic attacks testify to the fact that a blazing fire is raging in the soul of this Afghanistan veteran. In three episodes, Iryna Tsilyk tells of how, over the years, the two friends engage with one another in a highly entertaining but also tragic way, and how ultimately their lives develop in very different directions. The screenplay is based on the novel “Who Are You?” by Tsilyk's husband Artem Chekh, who most recently wrote of his own war experiences in an essay entitled "I've Accepted my Death". A thought that, even in his worst nightmares, he probably couldn't have imagined at the time this film was made.

Text: Joshua Jádi
English: Peter Rickerby

Kammerbühne: original version with English subtitles + German simultaneous translation