Extinction

Hypnotic and multi-layered, Extinction, meditates on the troubled borders of Eastern Europe with melancholic lyricism. Shot in black and white, Salomé Lamas's filmic essay follows Kolya, a young man loyal to Transnistria, the Communist state that broke away from the former Moldavian Soviet Socialist Republic, which is unrecognized by the international community today.

Navigating through dreamlike echoes of the Soviet past and Kolya's politically charged encounters in the present, the film slowly builds up an associative, non-linear story of a landscape in which the borders between past and present remain unsettled.

The end of the cold war did not produce a thaw throughout the continent. A peculiarity of today's Europe is the variety of ?frozen conflicts? it contains.

Transnistria is an unrecognized state that broke away from the former Moldavian Soviet Socialist Republic of the Soviet Union in 1990.

The film is a casual juxtaposition of the elevated with the banal, with an eerily convincing logic of paradox.