FREE ON CINEGEEK.DE Vodka Lemon 

Somewhere in the mountains, in post-Soviet Armenia, we get to know a small village. A village whose inhabitants know how to get by despite abject poverty. Here lives Hamo (Romen Avinian), a former soldier who travels every day to his dead wife's grave to tell her about the sons' latest embarrassments. There he meets the beautiful Nina (Lala Sarkissian), who also visits the grave of her deceased and works at a lemon stand. Over a long period of time, the two grow closer - punctuated by interludes of poverty. Hamo haggles over furniture, a woman prostitutes herself, and everyone ponders whether things weren't better under communism back then. The beauty is that the people in the film are depressed, the film itself not at all! At one point, Hamo sells one of his pieces of furniture to a couple. Unable to wear it, they set off a chain of hilarious mishaps that remind us of Polanski's Two-Men-And-A-Wardrobe. In the end, Nina and Hamo are also so confused by a simple question that they finally find their way out of their mundane rut. Life is beautiful, Vodka Lemon tells us, celebrating the perseverance of these people. And that's exactly what the beautiful images reflect, when the snow gently trickles down as if in love. A happy ending just like in a fairy tale (only much more whimsical!). Just across the street from our video store is a Kurdish film distributor and I believe it was he who told me a bit more about the production. How director Hiner Saleem actually never wanted to return to the village where he already shot his debut film. Everything there was far too complicated, he said, and after all, he would come from just such a village. Things that could be done in a few minutes take days. But he obviously willed himself to shoot a second film there about the proud and poor villagers, the late happiness of love and the absurd charm of the region.