The Tribe

[projekktor id=’19955′]

The Tribe is a Ukrainian drama written and directed by Myroslav Slaboshpytskiy. Set in a boarding school for deaf children, the entire film is signed in Ukrainian sign language without a single line of spoken dialogue. The cast features actors who are also deaf, led by Grigory Fesenko and Yana Novikova.

Teenage Sergey (Grigoriy Fesenko), a new student at the boarding school, realizes immediately that he must prove himself worthy to be brought under the protective wing of the school gang’s leader to survive unscathed. After an indoctrination of harmless initiation pranks and rites, Sergey’s new-found clique soon introduces him to their common activities of robbery, bribery and prostitution. At first assimilating seamlessly into his new role in the tribe, he finds himself compromised as he begins to fall in love with his female classmate—and one of the gang’s escorts—triggering a sequence of stunningly diabolical events.

“It’s been my old dream to do homage to the silent movie,” explains Slaboshpytskiy. “To make a film that can be understood without a single voiced word. It’s not that I was thinking about some kind of a European “existential” movie in which the heroes would keep silence throughout half the film. And besides, actors were not silent in the silent movie. They communicated very actively through a wealth of byplay and body language. They could communicate emotions and feelings without a line to say. And it is not by incident that most of silent movie stars had come from the pantomime. This is exactly why I’ve always wanted to shoot a film about the life of deaf-and-dumb people.

The Tribe is rated R.