PAUSA ITALIANA

In 1998 it seemed impossible to Balagura to make films in the Ukraine without becoming a slave to television; he therefore left for Italy, the "country of culture". With no immigration papers, with a wife and two children, the less agreeable realities of his situation soon caught up with him. In 2004, armed with a basic mini-DV camera borrowed from a friend, in the company of a casual acquaintance who agreed to act as camera operator, he shot 'Pausa Italiana'. From a small village in the Abruzzi region, with which he was well acquainted, he observed the reality surrounding him; he also turned the camera upon his own status as migrant, a situation which no documentarist would be capable of capturing. Permitting himself a rather unusual temporality, he allies the precision of his recordings with a fragmentary narrative of great literary quality. The combination of these two elements gives the film a very particular quality: auto-fiction and ethnography intersect to form an Aristotelian poetic, which avoids any separation between self and other, observer and observed, the real and the cosmic. (Nicolas Rey)