Here we finally have a recent Ukrainian film in which the tension with Russia is not the theme, but “My Thoughts Are Silent” is a somewhat bizarre, almost Kaurismaki humor drama – a tragicomedy. “My Thoughts Are Silent” was chosen as the best Ukrainian film of the year, and it also received a special award from the jury at the festival in Karlovy Vary, Czech Republic, where it premiered. It is a film that, from the very beginning, that is, from the black-and-white prologue set in 1526 after the defeat of Hungary by the Turks on the Field of Mohács, starts off rather strangely. Thus, in the prologue, we see two monks to whom the third tries to sell a miracle-working relic, i.e. Jesus’ milk tooth, after the battle, and the main character of this film will head to a similar swamp where the heads of the last Hungarian-Croatian King Ludovic II stood.
He is Vadim, a young sound engineer who lives in Kiev, and the guy is over two meters tall and incredibly thin, so physically he looks like the younger brother of former Romanian basketball player George Muresan. He works as a freelancer and records all kinds of nonsense like the laughter and coughing of elderly people, and he will get lucky when he is hired by a Canadian computer game company that is looking for someone to record the sounds of animals in western Ukraine. Canadian animals sound excessive, as if they are not afraid of anything, his superior explains to him why they really need the sounds of Ukrainian animals, and Vadim will receive a special bonus of one thousand dollars and a job in Canada if he manages to record the voice of a rare duck that lives exclusively in the marshes between Ukraine and Romania .
Fate worked out that Vadim is originally from Transcarpathia, and he will return to his native Uzhhorod. There he will be picked up by his mother, Gala (Irma Vitovska), a woman in her late forties who is going through a serious midlife crisis, and since Vadim has not passed his driving test, his mother will also serve as his driver for the search for animals. And “My Thoughts Are Silent” will turn into a cute, at times really funny, bitter-sweet comedy about the reunion of mother and son. Antonio Lukić, a debutant feature film, a young Ukrainian filmmaker born in Uzhgorod, made a very eccentric film, at times funny and witty, a charming little film that stands out for its authentic locations and fine camera.
It’s a film that only superficially pokes fun at the sad but real fact that a good part of young people from the East of Europe only dream of one day moving somewhere to the West and cannot be seen in the country where they were born. The film is also about life expectations, because the mother, who is completely dissatisfied with her life and has probably been disappointed a thousand times, constantly questions her son and questions when he will settle down and when he will have a normal life. But what is a normal life anyway and how do you explain to your mom that what is normal for her is actually not for you. A great dynamic has been achieved in the relationships between the main characters, and Lukič also uses the authenticity of the climate in which the action takes place.