"La Palisade": what is the movie about that will represent Ukraine at the Oscars

The Ukrainian Oscar Committee has named the film that will represent our country at the Oscars. Philip Sotnychenko's crime drama "La Palisade" will compete for the Best International Feature Film nomination.

OBOZ.UA tells you what this movie is about. And why it is definitely worth watching.

For Sotnychenko, "La Palisade" was his debut in feature films. He had previously made several successful short films. He wrote the script for the film with the help of Alina Panasenko. The cast includes Andriy Zhurba, Novruz Pashayev (Hikmet), Valeria Oleynikova, Oleksandr Parkhomenko, Olena Medvedeva-Mamchur, Danylo Bondarev, Oleksandr Maleev, Vasyl Manyak, Sana Shakhmuradova-Tanska, and Yarema Malashchuk.

The film takes place in 1996, a few months before the introduction of a moratorium on the death penalty in Ukraine. A policeman with the rank of colonel is killed in Uzhhorod. The deceased's friends, a forensic psychiatrist, and a police detective, set out to find the killer. They are in a hurry because they want to have time to sentence the killer to the highest form of punishment. For some reason, the suspect they hastily point to does not deny his involvement in the crime.

The film was first presented to the public at the Rotterdam Film Festival in December 2023, where it won the FIPRESCI award. Since then, La Palisade has won many awards: it was named the best film at the Turin and Vilnius Film Festivals, Sotnychenko won the best director award at the Sarajevo International Film Festival "Heart of Sarajevo", and the Ukrainian national film critics' award "Kinokolo" named his work the best feature film of the year. The film was also named Film of the Year by the Ukrainian Black Lotus Award and was nominated for 14 Golden Jig Awards.

"La Palisade" has been in the Ukrainian box office since January 11, 2024, and has grossed UAH 1.5 million against a budget of UAH 14 million. However, despite the lack of public attention, critics were very supportive of Sotnychenko's work. In particular, they praised the film for accurately conveying the atmosphere of the nineties, but without the blackness inherent in such films. And also without romanticizing that difficult period.

Sotnychenko portrays characters who have inherited from the Soviet era the habit of closing cases "for the sake of it" without digging into the truth. At the same time, he shows his characters as normal people with their own good and bad traits.

"I wanted to talk not about the 90s, but about the present, in which we find ourselves," the director described his creative idea. In the film, he is looking for the origins of modernity in an era when Ukraine and Ukrainians went through a turn of the century.

Despite being a detective story, the film does not suffer from genre clichés. Sotnichenko was praised for the intricate, colorful structure of his work and the lack of moralizing or immersion in nostalgia.

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