IFFK: Slovakian film Victim has a nuanced take on a thorny issue

A single lie, arising out of a teenager’s embarrassment about the truth of the injuries he had sustained, can have unforeseen ramifications. In the hands of xenophobic groups, the lie can be woven into a wider narrative to be part of their constant hate propaganda against an outsider group or another.

Slovakian director Michal Blasko’s Victim (Obet), the country’s official submission for the Oscar award for the best foreign language film in the upcoming 95th Academy Awards, being screened in the World Cinema category at the ongoing 27th International Film Festival of Kerala (IFFK), looks closely at how this dangerous game plays out.

Irina, a recent immigrant from Ukraine to a town on the Czech border, finds that her teenage son Igor has sustained serious injuries during an incident which happened when she was away to get their citizenship paperwork done. There is a lot of mystery about the incident. No one really knows what happened. To the leading questions from the police officer, Igor, who can hardly speak, gives a nod, establishing the lie that the attack must have been carried out by young neighbours belonging to the Romani (Roma) community.

The local neo-Nazi far-right groups get wind of the story and start to build a ground-level movement to corner the Roma community. It is another matter that these groups have no love lost for the Ukrainian community, to which Igor and his mother belong. But, pitting the Ukrainian mother against the Roma community works to their short-term advantage.

Blasko uses the mother character to explore how even well-intentioned humans would behave in such situations, especially after she realises that her son sustained the injury from a fall, and not due to an attack by the neighbours.

One cannot blame the mother too in wanting to protect her son whatever be the cost, but also cannot miss the toll that it takes on the society she lives in. She does not use the multiple opportunities she gets to clear the air despite the fact that her neighbour’s young son, a member of a minority immigrant community like hers, is in jail due to the lie.

Yet, when she takes the effort to clear his name, the neo-Nazis would latch on to that to further make life difficult for the Roma community. Not to be outdone, the Mayor and other local politicians attempt to win Irina’s favour, promising her a better house and opportunities, and even that elusive citizenship, which she so wishes for.

Blasko might be focussing on a Czech town and a few communities in his debut film, but it is a story that would resonate all across the Europe of today, which has been witnessing the flaring up of tensions as a result of the growth of far-right groups and their virulent anti-immigrant agenda. Victim is a nuanced take on an issue that is perhaps not going to disappear anytime soon.