Numbers

The world as an absurdly abstract one-room cosmos. Ten figures are practising daily rituals, walking in circles. They do not know who they are or where they come from, nor do they have names. The men wear odd numbers, the women even numbers. Their dating behaviour, like everything else, is subject to rules that are as strict as they are pointless. An omnipresent, godlike leader (“The Great Zero”) surveys the goings-on; judges are armed. This is a system of governance that leads to the elimination of all independence – but then an unplanned child disturbs the order. The time is ripe again for dystopian stories. Simultaneously, Nomera is a film that has fallen out of time: it was created under impossible circumstances and in an existential vacuum. The writer and co-director is Oleg Sentsov, Russia’s most famous political prisoner from 2014 to 2019. Somewhere between the filming location of Kyiv and the penal colony near Labytnangi, close to the Arctic Circle, where Sentsov was imprisoned, a laborious, clandestine working method evolved that contributed to the end of Sentsov’s hunger strike and has now resulted in a film of raw political significance. (Berlinale)