Actor and assistent director of the film Novruz Hikmet presented the film in Turin while his friend director Philip Sotnychenko remained in Kiew and not able to attend the TFF because it's not so easy these days, because of the war Novruz told me. Novruz Hikmet is born in Baku and currently based in Cologne/Germany.

La Palisiada is Philip Sotnychenko’s debute feature film and the winner of the 41st Turin Film Festival. The world premiere took place at the Rotterdam Film Festival, and won the Fipresce award. 

La Palisiada brings to the stage the trial of the last of the state-sanctioned executions prior to the moratorium on capital punishment, which went into effect in August ’96. The protagonists are forensic psychiatrist Oleksandr (Andrii Zhurba) and his friend detective Ilhar (Novruz Hikmet), who looking for the killer of a police colonel. In this case, however, it is not about finding the real murderer, what really matters is to find a victim.

Here is the trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QbRtv4hSmM4

The atmosphere in the film is is post-apocalyptic and the images in brown and grey or black and difficult to watch, not my favorite film : the past continues to interfere with the present, and the angelic voices of the children’s choirs are not enough to forget that part of their songs were written by others. Time in La Palisiada seems to have stopped. The Ukraine that Sotnychenko decides to bring to the screen still has the face of the colonized, that of those who cannot get rid of their skeletons in the closet and who abandon in fear their desire to change things. And in the meantime, weapons increase in number and one must prepare for a long night: there is a sense in the air that some shots may be fired. On these occasions, the Russian authors have always been eloquent: “If a gun appears in a novel, you have to shoot.”