This year’s opening ceremony for the CinEast Film Festival opened with a momentous screening of Luxembourg, Luxembourg, a 2022 Ukrainian film which brought much-needed levity to an event overshadowed by the ongoing war in the country.
Written and directed by Antonio Lukich and starring Ukrainian twins Amil and Ramil Nasirov, Luxembourg, Luxembourg had a room full of non-Ukrainian speakers laughing at witty dialogue and physical comedy.
What’s astounding is how deftly Luxembourg, Luxembourg – from its opening scenes – managed to bring back a sense of light-heartedness. The film, which also screened at this year’s Toronto International Film Festival and La Biennale di Venezia, follows twins in the Ukrainian city of Lubny.
Shortly after the collapse of communism in the early 1990s, their mother had gone shopping in the Balkans and had come back with a Serbian husband involved in organised crime. They remember their father, whom they hadn’t seen since they were children, with varying degrees of fondness. Vasya, one of the twins, is a police officer and regards his with indifference at best. The other twin, Kolya, a bus driver and cannabis seller, idolises his gangster dad.
Luxembourg, Luxembourg establishes its comedic tone early on: subtle body language, and voice overs by Kolya admittedly give the film’s comedy a slightly dark hue, although it takes care to never forsake meaningful family drama for a cheap laugh. Within the first few minutes of the film’s premiere at Neumünster, a formerly sombre crowd was howling at the constant humiliations faced by the leading twins.
Kolya, in-between getting into trouble at work and failing to attract women, suddenly gets a phone call from the Ukrainian consulate in Luxembourg. The twins’ father is in a hospital, dying, and Kolya asks his brother to go with him to the Grand Duchy. Vasya, sick of his delinquent twin and not interested in seeing his uncaring father, refuses.
But through a series of comedic failures – be they in relationships, at work, or via family – the pair suddenly find it in their best interest to leave Lubny to see their dying father. A thoroughly black comedy by this point, Luxembourg, Luxembourg through body language and subtitles alone delivered moments of uproar from the crowd.
Before the film began, a series of dignitaries from Luxembourg and Eastern Europe took to the stage at Neimënster Abbey’s Robert Krieps room – a large auditorium rivalling Kinepolis’ theatres in size – to herald the start of the CinEast Film Festival, which will last around two and a half weeks.
Via a video message, Ukraine’s Minister of Culture and Information Policy Oleksandr Tkachenko addressed the festival directly, emphasising the continued importance of art and film and cultural cooperation between Ukraine and EU countries.
“Ukraine, despite the terrible context of the war is rightfully returning to the European cultural space to which it mentally and historically belongs,” Tkachenko said.
The relieving sense of levity which Luxembourg, Luxembourg brought to CinEast’s opening ceremony would have been no easy feat. But by the time the twins made their way to the Grand Duchy to visit their father and audience members started recognising landmarks, the film had managed to turn the atmosphere from one overshadowed by war to one where the room sometimes reached near-hysteric levels of laughter.
Luxembourg, Luxembourg will be screened for the last time on CinEast’s final day on 23 October at Neumünster. Luxembourg, Luxembourg, in my view, is one of this year’s festival’s highlights.
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