LAST RESORT



UK, 2000, 73 min, color

Tanya and her ten-year-old son Artyom fly from Moscow to England, expecting to be picked up by her English fiance. But not surprisingly at Stansted airport they are detained by the British police, who suspect that not everything is on the up and up. Tanya decides to seek political asylum. She and her son are taken to a refugee camp on the coast at Stonehaven, and there they meet an Englishman named Alfie who takes a liking to Tanya. He not only tries to make life in the camp as pleasant as possible but also to help get them out of it.

"What always interested me in films (as in life) were people who defied the norm, whose personalities defied their environment, who despite being social underdogs haven't lost their ability to yearn. This sort of humanism, once quite common in European Cinema (Neo-Realism, the Czech New Wave), can nowadays only be found in Chinese or Iranian films. What I tried to do in my film was to combine psychological truth and naturalism in the acting with a dreamlike abstract quality in its visual style."