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‘La Palisiada’ Review: Elliptical Ukrainian Drama Set in 1996 Is a Disquieting Provocation
Ukraine’s Oscar submission, Philip Sotnychenko's 'La Palisiada,' is an unsettling police procedural about a pivotal moment in the country’s history.
Philip Sotnychenko “ La Palisiada ” takes that truism and braids it into a suitably complex form: This 1996-set noir of sorts chronicles a pivotal moment in Ukrainian history by focusing on a murder investigation. The investigation is led by forensic psychiatrist Oleksandr (Andrii Zhurba) and his detective friend Ilhar (Novruz Pashayev), who find it increasingly hard to parse facts from fiction, and who struggle to wade through a bureaucratic world that is clamoring for a culprit — anyone, no matter what the evidence or the witnesses may say. But it’s the form of the film that tells the story here — whether with long, still scenes that merely feature its characters eating and drinking in silence as a song plays from a record player, or equally intriguing moments where handheld cinematography evokes the aesthetic of a ’90s home video.
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