After winning the Silver Lion for Best Director with Miss Violence (2013), Greek filmmaker Alexandros Avranas returns to the Lido in the Orizzonti section with his latest work. This time, the focus is on a Russian family exiled to Sweden, where one might assume the biggest challenges would be adapting to the language, food, culture, and peculiar pop music. However, their true ordeal is only beginning. Known for his sharp exploration of human psychology intertwined with social issues, Avranas once again puts the family unit to the test. In his fifth feature, Quiet Life, parents Sergei and Natalia face the devastating aftermath of their asylum application being denied, which shakes their family to its core—especially when their youngest daughter, Katia, collapses into a mysterious coma.… Read the rest
Perspectives of regret and the uncertain odyssey of retrospection emphasize the undertones of perennial auteur 
Music seems to be the language of the heart in The Life Apart (La vita accanto), a bizarre tale of suffering and expiation relayed with sedate repose by director Marco Tullio Giordana. Having directed a number of films over the past forty-plus years, Giordana won Locarno’s Golden Leopard for his 1980 debut Damn You, I Will Love You (Maledetti vi amerò), and has been a staple in the Italian film industry ever since. Often dealing in period dramas and coming-of-age sagas (often with epic running times, such as one of his most celebrated titles, 2003’s The Best of Youth), his latest is in keeping with his thematic interests, spanning the childhood of a troubled young pianist in 1980s Vicenza.… 
Lithuanian filmmaker Saulė Bliuvaitė perhaps could not have contrived a more succinct title than Toxic (Akiplėša) for her debut feature, set in the bleak confines of an industrial town where dysfunction and desolation is the day-to-day norm. Not all is despairing, despite what it sounds like on paper, as two thirteen-year-old girls, each outcasts for their own unique reasons, forge a fast friendship, initially as a means for subconscious survival. While the template of the narrative is quite familiar, Bliuvaitė makes some distinctive choices elevating this beyond both miserabilism or sentimental absolution, meandering like its subjects toward some ill-formed ideas about how to escape an environment they did not choose and will certainly not uplift them.… 
