Katia's Sister

This is a bleak, difficult film about a Russian family - a mother and her two daughters - struggling to survive in Amsterdam.    We join the story late, in the sense that mom has already fallen into a life of prostitution.  Beautiful seventeen year old Katia is in a rebellious stage, and despite her mom's pleadings, begins to work at a strip club.  Homely, sweet-natured 13-year old Lucia stays at home, searching for identity and someone to love her.   She reaches out to her mom and sister desperately as their relationship falls apart and mom leaves the girls in the apartment to move in with a boyfriend.

This film was well conceived and made, immersing you in the family's love and pain right from the first shot.   All of it was told from Lucia's perspective, to the point that the viewpoint never moved above her head....so for example, we saw a lot of mid-sections of boyfriends, and not faces. A significant problem as a viewer who speaks neither Russian nor Dutch (and was reading subtitles, perhaps overly lazily) is that there was no overt indication anywhere in the film that Katia and family were not from Amsterdam (ie were emigres - I got this only from reading the TIFF review after the fact), so much of the pathos of their plight  was missed or misunderstood by me at the time.  Mild recommendation.