Right and innocent – Newspaper Kommersant No. 53 (7498) of 03/29/2023

Aita by the Yakut director Stepan Burnashev, a crime thriller in form and a social drama in content, is being released. Watching with hope how cinema from this region is firmly taking place on screens across the country Yulia Shagelman.

“Aita” is already the third film by Stepan Burnashev, released in the last few months, after the horror “The Curse. Dead Earth” and the melodrama “Our Winter”. In the interval between them, several more films by Yakut directors were released. And although their box office receipts are not too impressive yet (unlike the Republic of Sakha itself, where even in times of more intense distribution than now, their own films competed on equal terms with Hollywood releases), Yakut cinema is slowly but surely turning from a festival curiosity into mainstream.

Moreover, the stories, at least those that Stepan Burnashev tells in his films, are quite universal and understandable everywhere, despite some local specifics. The action of “Aita” takes place in a small Yakut village flooded with endless rains that washed away the roads and cut it off from the “mainland”. This makes the space of the film closed, and the tension that builds up in it becomes especially strong, threatening to blow up this small world and completely destroy it.

A night call wakes investigator Nikolai (Innokenty Lukovtsev) out of bed: a high school student Aita (Aitalyyna Yakovleva) tried to commit suicide. Unfortunately, it is not possible to save the girl, while at the autopsy it turns out that she was pregnant, and in her pocket her mother (Ilyana Pavlova) finds a note with the words “I hate you, Afonya”, indicating the possible culprit of the tragedy. Only one Afonya lives in the village – this is a Russian policeman (Andrey Fomin) who moved from the Voronezh region, a subordinate of Nikolai. It turns out that it was he who drove Aita, who was returning home from a party, on a fatal evening, and soon there are witnesses who claim that they have seen the girl with Athanasius in his car more than once, where they kissed. He denies that he had a connection with a schoolgirl – yes, he gave a ride once and nothing more, but thanks to social networks, information about the “cop-pedophile” is spreading around the village like wildfire.

Nicholas finds himself in an ambiguous position. On the one hand, he himself does not have warm feelings for Athanasius, since he has never been an exemplary employee. On the other hand, he cannot allow lynching – namely, the father of the deceased girl (Georgy Bessonov) wants to commit it, since there is no connection and no one outside the village will know anything. Nikolay decides to follow his duty and hide Afonya in the police station, while at the same time desperately trying to contact the higher authorities from the regional center, and because of this, he becomes the same enemy in the eyes of his fellow villagers as the Russian “rapist”.

“Aita” is a rare film on our screens, in which it is the Russian person who becomes “come in large numbers” and is hated only for this. The situation of xenophobia, inverted compared to the more familiar picture, when strangers are people with non-white skin who do not speak Russian well, appears on the screen even more pointed, but no less recognizable. The instinctive distrust and suspicion with which ordinary citizens treat the police are also recognizable, although Nikolai and his colleagues, with the exception of Afonya, are more like exemplary servants of law and order from American films.

But having started an honest conversation on uncomfortable topics, Burnashev and his co-writer Svetlana Taayko end it with a compromise ending, in which everyone is right and no one is to blame. Moreover, they pronounce morality for completely slow-witted viewers, as was already the case in their previous film “Our Winter”. However, interest in their future work still remains. Especially if a little courage is added to the ability to quickly shoot for little money, work with non-professional actors and clearly tell a story in an hour and a half.