Stop - Zemlia

For her debut feature film, Ukrainian director Kateryna Gornostai impresses with a fiction film that moves in tune with its ensemble cast, following their lives with a hand-held camera: the effect is documentary-like, with realistic dialogues and scenes, and a beautiful cinematography. Stop-Zemlia takes place during the final year of Masha's high school. A shy and artistic teenager, Masha is a bit of an outsider, but her close friends Senia and Yana are never far away. She is attracted to Sasha, a handsome classmate who hides a complicated relationship with his single mother. 

Stop-Zemlia is in some ways an experimental film, with its non-linear narrative, its in-character interviews with the cast, and its hyper-realistic feel. It is also a meaningful, non-judgmental representation of contemporary teenagehood in Ukraine.