Almost Spring
2021 · 14m
Directed by Nastia Korkia
Genres: documentary, drama
Tones: contemplative, melancholic
Tamara, a primary school teacher, moves through stark observational long takes — teaching class, then overseeing votes at the Presidential Election — as snow melts over the city.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
Almost Spring coasts on the assumption that juxtaposing teaching and elections over melting snow equals meaning — it's the kind of 'observed life as metaphor' that festival crowds eat up, and I find it fundamentally inert.
Korkia's long-take observational grammar situates itself squarely in the Wiseman tradition of institutional cinema, and the formal discipline here — holding on bureaucratic and pedagogical routines while the season shifts outside — achieves a quiet, almost liturgical rigor.
The choice to keep the camera absolutely still while Tamara moves through these spaces creates an odd vertigo: we're watching someone navigate systems that won't move for her, and that restraint is what makes the snow-melt feel earned rather than decorative.
Reviews
In stark, long, observational shots that betray Director Nastia Korkia's background in documentary filmmaking, she attends school, teaches class, then is assigned the specific job of overseeing the votes at the Presidential Election.