Ayka (2018)

Directed by: Sergei Dvortsevoy | 110 minutes | drama | Actors: Samal Yeslyamova, Zhipara Abdilaeva, Sergey Mazur, David Alaverdyan, Andrey Kolyadov, Slava Agashkin, Azamat Satimbaev, Galina Kravets, Askhat Kuchencherekov, Kenzhebek Karybaev, Nurzhamal Mamadalieva, Nurzhan Kunnozarova, Natalsia Kunnozarova, Um Semyk, Aleksandr Zlatopolskiy

Snow plows and plows dominate the streets in the Moscow of ‘Ayka’. There is almost no fighting against; the winter holds social life inexorably in its grip. In the midst of this misery – in a chilly and impersonal maternity hospital – the young Kyrgyz woman Ayka has just given birth to a son. When she is abruptly awakened by a maternity assistant to feed her baby, she stumbles to the toilet, shouting at her to hurry up. Ayka does that too, but not in the way the woman intended. Ayka flees through the window and makes a run for it. What prompted her to leave her newborn baby behind?

‘Ayka’ is an uncompromising film about the hardship of illegal refugees. Sergey Dvortesevoy once again cast Samal Yeslyamova, who played Asa’s sister Samal in his feature film debut ‘Tulpan’ (2008). Samal carries the entire film on her shoulders, she is barely out of the picture and the camera follows her, jerkily, closely and is close to her skin. It quickly becomes clear why she has rushed to take this drastic measure. Like a cornered cat, she tries to survive in all sorts of ways. That is not exactly made easy for her. Ayka works herself to the bone, but encounters almost nothing but dishonest people on her path. Together with a group of other women, she checks when she – barely recovered from childbirth – sees her boss leave a chicken slaughterhouse in the boiling hot room, supposedly only for a moment. All she has left of that hard work (which she did before giving birth) is a plucked chicken.

Once “home” – as far as you can speak of it – in an overcrowded apartment full of people in a similar situation – Ayka tries to calm down, but her physical complaints quickly take the upper hand. Heavy bleeding and not much later a serious breast infection because she does not feed her baby play tricks on her. In addition, she keeps getting a call from someone she actually wants to ignore at all costs.

It’s not all doom and gloom, thankfully, because one chance encounter is with someone who means her well. And then you immediately see what it really takes to make someone feel just a little bit human. ‘Ayka’ feels very authentic, which can absolutely be attributed to Samal, but story-wise the cake is gone after a while. Despair piles on hopelessness, and in the end only the unsurprising ending adds something new. That doesn’t make the desolate ‘Ayka’ a bad film, certainly not, but the visualization of this desperation could have used a little more variety.