LUXEMBOURG, LUXEMBOURG: Ukrainian Film Week at FOMO Cinema Tbilisi

LUXEMBOURG, LUXEMBOURG is a Ukrainian comedy about two brothers, one absent father, and the way family myths can keep shaping people long after the person behind them has disappeared. Antonio Lukich follows twin brothers Kolya and Vasya, whose lives in central Ukraine have taken very different shapes. One is chaotic, impulsive and permanently close to trouble. The other has built himself around order, work and respectability.

When they learn their estranged father may be dying in Luxembourg, the brothers are pulled into a journey neither of them can approach honestly. For one, the father remains a heroic figure. For the other, he is a wound best left untouched. Lukich uses this tension to build a film that is funny without being weightless, and sentimental only when it earns the right.

The film premiered in the Orizzonti section at Venice, where it helped introduce a wider international audience to Lukich’s dry, precise comic voice. His humour comes from embarrassment, family friction and the small humiliations of ordinary life rather than easy punchlines.

Screening after EVERYTHING IS ILLUMINATED, LUXEMBOURG, LUXEMBOURG keeps Wednesday’s theme of family baggage firmly on the road. Both films are about men searching for missing pieces of family history. Neither finds exactly what they were looking for.