Details
Tanya comes to England with her 12 year old son Artiom to marry a man she fell in love with.
When the latter fails to appear at the airport, immigration try to send her back. Desperate, Tanya claims political asylum and is sent to a bleak, out-of-season seaside resort from which there is no escape. Using a combination of composed static wide shots and hand-held camera, the film elevates some real locations in Margate into an expressive soulscape of its lost heroine.
‘There is no finite neatness in a Hollywood sense, but a lack of conclusion which is entirely deliberate because that is how life so often is. Tanya is not from the subjugated poor, but the Russian bourgeoisie (she was a children’s book illustrator in Russia). Nevertheless she is still an asylum victim, and her plight is examined from her point of view.