'The Tribe' Trailer: This Movie Still Haunts Me

I saw The Tribe last September, and still think about the movie pretty much every day. No other film has impressed me quite like this one did with its unique creation of drama via sound and image. Few other performances have been as devastating and courageous as those from leads Grigoriy Fesenko and Yana Novikova.

Taking place at a boarding school for the deaf, the film features no spoken dialogue; the characters communicate in sign language and outbursts of violence. There are no subtitles for the sign language, but those communications come through just as clearly as the intent behind the violence. This debut feature from Myroslav Slaboshpytskiy is as confident as they come, and shocking in its unblinking frankness.

Check out the excellent The Tribe trailer below.

The Tribe opens on June 17. Trailer via Apple.

Winner of multiple 2014 Cannes Film Festival Awards (including the coveted Critics' Week Grand Prix), Myroslav Slaboshpytskiy's "The Tribe" is an undeniably original and intense feature debut set in the insular world of a Ukrainian high school for the deaf. Teenage Sergey (Grigoriy Fesenko), a new student at the boarding school, realizes immediately that he must prove himself worthy to be brought under the protective wing of the school gang's leader to survive unscathed. After an indoctrination of harmless initiation pranks and rites, Sergey's newfound clique soon introduces him to their common activities of robbery, bribery and prostitution. At first assimilating seamlessly into his new role in the tribe, he finds himself compromised as he begins to fall in love with his female classmate—and one of the gang's escorts—triggering a sequence of stunningly diabolical events.