Muristek
Anastasia Budiashkina is excellent as a young athlete exiled during the 2014 revolution in this moving drama released to raise funds for Ukrainian refugees
Events have lent an explosive new significance to this prophetic movie about the agony of exile from debut director Elie Grappe, which showed at Cannes last year and is now being released in UK cinemas to raise money for Ukrainian refugees. It concerns Olga, a dedicated teenage Ukrainian gymnast, excellently played by the real-life Ukrainian gymnast Anastasia Budiashkina, who herself last week arrived in Poland after escaping Kharkiv.
In the movie, Olga leaves her homeland for Switzerland during the 2014 Maidan revolution to compete for the Swiss team during the European championships in Stuttgart. Her widowed mother was able to get her out to safety because Olga’s dad was Swiss, and she herself is being threatened by the state for her work as an investigative journalist uncovering corruption during the pro-Russian presidency. Olga is lonely, tired, scared, reflexively suspicious of her Swiss hosts – but also a superb competitor who can obliterate all her anxieties with her fanatical commitment to work in this state-of-the-art Swiss gym. But as the tough training programme continues and Olga’s tricky relationship with her sullen French- and Italian-speaking teammates gets complicated, the news comes through of how Ukraine (and her mother) are under brutal assault. Olga is wretched with remorse for leaving her friends and family for the bland safeness of Switzerland. The power, athleticism and beauty of her gymnastics now have a new choreography of guilt and rage.
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