93 minutes. In Russian/Romanian/Ukranian with English subtitles.
Atmospherically shot on 16mm film, Transnistra is an intimate and vital account of love and friendship in a complex, contradictory world. Over a period of four seasons, charismatic 16-year-old Tanya and her group of guy friends navigate their coming of age in Transnistria, a breakaway state created in the wake of Soviet collapse, on the edge of Moldova near the Ukraine border. In their town of Kamenka, days of swimming and climbing construction sites are interspersed with their exploration of blossoming young love and the search for identity, against a cultural backdrop of Russian pop music and the teachings of Fidel Castro. As they approach adulthood, they must also learn to forge out a future, and to define themselves within a society that offers little opportunities.
Award-winning director Anna Eborn (Pine Ridge) intimately follows this group of young people as they move from a sweltering, carefree summer through an unforgiving winter in the self-proclaimed state of Transnistria, where the national flag still holds the hammer and sickle. (Sweden, 2019)
“A light documentary that follows a charismatic 16-year-old and her posse of male peers living in the breakaway republic of Transnistria”—Variety
“Intimately shot on 16mm film, Eborn explores the dynamics of the group, commenting discreetly on youth, love and life in a place such as this”—Cine-Vue
ABOUT THE DIRECTOR
Anna Eborn was born in 1983 in Sweden. Her debut feature length and self edited documentary, Pine Ridge, was selected in the Official Selection at the Venice International Film Festival 2013 and won best Nordic documentary at the International Film festival in Gothenburg in 2014. Further films include Epifania, a hybrid/fiction which premiered at the Busan International Film Festival in 2016, and the feature-length documentary Lida, which premiered in competition at CPH:DOX 2017 and in the international competition at Visions du Reel 2017.