Moscow Syndrome: A Bit of A Stranger

"Everything has to burn, so that we live in the future not in the past.” These words come not from the Kremlin but from the elderly mother of filmmaker Svitlana Lishchynska, one of the four female stars (including the director herself) of A Bit of a Stranger, a Berlinale-debuting doc from Ukraine. The film, which fittingly just nabbed the Andriy Matrosov Prize “for its brave examination of identity issues” at Docudays UA, takes us on an intriguing (mind) trip to a Kafkaesque world – specifically the brainwashed headspace of the many Russian-speaking Ukrainians sharing the frontlines with their Russian tormentors.

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