Anton (2019)

Anton is the posthumous work of the Georgian director Zaza Urushadze, who’s been nominated for an Oscar for his film Tangerines. On one hand, Anton seems like a children’s film, but it takes place within anything but children’s narrative circumstances. The story unfolds in Ukraine in 1920, on the threshold of the Great Purge and the Holodomor. Two boys are growing up in a Jewish village, and all the mysterious events that are happening around them and that will later become history feel like a game with difficult rules to them. The plot reaches a new level when, for instance, an actor looking like Leon Trotsky appears on screen to seduce a woman. Altogether, this is a complex and multifugured work, which humanistically places equal weight on the roles played in history by the legendary personalities and ordinary kids.