Vodka Lemon

Details

Winner of the prestigious San Marco Prize at the 2003 Venice Film Festival and the official Armenian entry in the Best Film in a Foreign Language category at the Academy Awards, director Hiner Saleem's highly acclaimed Vodka Lemon is a charming, tragi-comic tale of two recently bereaved strangers whose seemingly bleak lives are revitalized by their regular meetings at the gravesides of their lost loved ones.

Sharing a house with his granddaughter and one of his two sons, widowed army veteran Hamo (Romen Avinian) ekes out a meagre existence as one of a small group of eccentric residents of the remote, snow-bound Kurdish village of Caucasus. Living on a pension of just seven dollars a month and with only a wardrobe, a vintage Soviet television set and his old army uniform to his name, Hamo's greatest pleasure comes in the form of the infrequent correspondence he receives from his other son, now living in Paris. Hamo's daily routine involves a trip to the local cemetery, where he sits before the grave of his beloved wife and recounts the latest family news.

His visits to the cemetery bring him into contact with Nina (Lala Sarkissian), an attractive widow who, when not paying her respects at her husband's grave, works at a roadside vodka lemon stall. Regularly sharing the silent, empty bus to and from the cemetery, Hamo and Nina gradually become friends, their burgeoning relationship providing a poignantly romantic air of optimism amid the hardship of life in post-Soviet Armenia.

A visual delight, Saleem's film is full of breathtaking landscapes and unforgettable images of surreal beauty – on his way to a funeral, a man is towed behind a van across the icefield in his bed; a mystery horseman unexpectedly gallops through scenes for no apparent reason; characters sit out in the barren, snowy wastelands drinking vodka and reminiscing. A romantic comedy of a different kind Vodka Lemon imaginatively mixes misery and love, tragedy and humour, to tell a moving and poetic tale of hope.

Vodka Lemon (cert. 12) will be released on DVD by Metrodome on 7th February 2005.