Sergei arrives at an Ukrainian boarding school for the deaf. He's a shy new kid who gets picked on. He is recruited into the ruling gang. They pimp out two of the older girls. Sergei is tasked with being the suitcase pimp and falls for Anya. King rules the organization and decides to sell the girls. Sergei revolts causing chaos and bloodshed.

There is sound but rarely any dialog. The sign language does not get translated into subtitles. One must guess at the plot but it's not impossible. The challenge of interpreting the story has some appeal. The question becomes what this is trying to achieve and what it actually achieves. It doesn't really put the audience into the shoes of the deaf. They actually know what's being said in the movie although it could give a sense of the deaf trying to understand the hearing world. There are some brutal graphic scenes. This is a shocking movie but I must admit that I fastforwarded some of the movie. It's too hard to watch such a quiet movie. One can't compare this to silent movies since those always have music. This is an interesting original experimental movie but I'm not sure what it achieves.

This is quite an astonishing piece of film making. Totally devoid of anything but ambient noise, it depicts the story of a gang of institutionalised youths (boys and girls) who live a sort of feral existence in Kiev. When they are not fighting with each other in an archetypal sort of hierarchical fashion, they are stealing, robbing passengers on a train, or pimping their girls to pull tricks with passing lorry drivers - indeed their whole existence is pretty unsavoury. What does connect them all? They are all deaf and what communication we do see between the actors is carried out by sign and body language and makes for a remarkably effective watch. Remarkable, but bleak - it can hardly be a film that Ukranian social services would applaud. These kids (mid/late teenagers) maraud at will both inside and outside their facility; their attitudes to each other and to the population at large are at best indifferent at worst down right brutal - and director Myroslav Slaboshpytskyi spares us none of that brutality and of the downright baseness of their lives. After a while, that bleakness begins to recycle itself and lose potency - just as, I suppose, their relentless existence might do in real life - so don't expect anything much by way of redemption at the end, but as an observation it's frequently quite hair raising and oddly compelling. From a technical perspective, the production is very basic but that serves to add to the authenticity of this frequently graphically delivered soupçon of life in an environment with very little hope... Certainly worth a watch, but it isn't fun!

Sergey, a deaf teenager, and is starting his first day at a special school for the deaf. He soon discovers that most things at the school are run by The Tribe, an anarchic, criminal gang of students. He falls foul of The Tribe and is bullied and attacked by them. However, over time he joins them and works his way up their ranks.

A very original movie: no audible spoken words at all, hardly any sound at all, in fact. The idea being that you need to experience the world of a deaf person. All communication between the characters is done by sign language, and there's no sub-titles. Even if you understand sign language (and, unfortunately, I don't) you probably wouldn't be able to make out what they're saying - the signing isn't directed at the camera.

So you have to watch this essentially as a silent movie, using actions and body language to figure out what is going on. This, and the intriguing plot (initially) make this quite interesting.

However, it lacks engagement. The main character isn't particularly interesting or likeable, and the more you get into the movie, the less you like him.

Plus, the plot can seem quite random at times. Having to use sight cues to determine the narrative does have its drawbacks...

Overall, okay, but could have been better.