dom bashenko

Eva Neyman’s second feature is a visually stunning film, shot in black and white by documentary cinematographer Rimvidas Leipus. Carefully composed shots seem to have fallen out of a photo album rather than being filmed with a motion picture camera. Thematically, though, the films departs from Neyman’s debut: if U reki told about old age and approaching death, this film focuses on an eight-year-old boy during the last winter of the war. Yet the theme of death permeates House with a Turret in a different way: early on in the film, the boy loses his mother to typhoid. In a strange twist of fate, the role of the sick and dying mother is the last screen appearance of Katia Golubeva, who died aged 44 in 2011. Based on an autobiographic novel by the Russian émigré writer Friedrich Gorenstein, the film traces the boy’s search for his grandfather and for his home, as instructed by his mother. Yet in the turmoil of the war, the story of the “home” in a house with a turret gets blurred: such a house stands in the town where his mother dies, but it is not his home. So the boy embarks on a journey, often unassisted, cheated, and exploited by fellow-travellers. These portrayals make for profound critiques of the loss of humanity in the face of war and offer rich vignettes in their poignancy and brevity. BiB