‘The Tribe’: the Ukrainian Cannes contender filmed entirely in sign language
Since its inception, the Cannes Film Festival has sought to showcase the best cinema has to offer, with a smorgasbord of titles from around the world being given the opportunity to announce themselves as a cinematic force to be reckoned with.
In recent years, the annual event has been broadening its horizons to incorporate more and more Hollywood blockbusters into its schedule, but if anything, that only serves to underline Cannes’ status as a haven for everything the artform has to offer from expensively assembled epics to intimate and experimental dramas.
In 2014, writer and director Myroslav Slaboshpytskiy ticked the latter box with The Tribe, a wordless drama that wasn’t only the first Ukrainian feature to be released in many countries around the world but the first to be filmed entirely in Ukrainian Sign Language. If that wasn’t daring enough, instead of operating as a straightforward drama, the movie takes its cues from the hard-boiled crime thriller.
Set in a boarding school for deaf teenagers, Hryhoriy Fesenko’s fresh-faced new student, Serhiy, tries to find his place at the academic institution by attempting to fit into its existing social hierarchy. However, he discovers that things are run more like a crime family than a school, with those at the head of the table running illicit activities that extend into violence, robbery, and prostitution.
When Serhiy is drafted in by the leading clique to leverage two female students as sex workers, he ends up falling in love with one of them, and she becomes pregnant with his child. Needless to say, the cycle of violence only begets more violence, with The Tribe building steam towards a shocking final act where the emotions repressed by the protagonist are finally unleashed under troubling circumstances.
A festival favourite, Slaboshpytskyi’s first feature premiered during Critics’ Week at the 2014 edition of Cannes. The filmmaker found himself shortlisted for the Caméra d’Or award for the best directorial debut, in addition to winning the Nespresso Grand Prize, the Gan Foundation Support for Distribution Award, and the France 4 Visionary Award.
As a result, The Tribe was considered a shoo-in to be submitted as Ukraine’s official ‘Best International Feature Film’ entry for the Academy Awards until controversy struck. When Oles Sanin’s The Guide got the nod instead, Slaboshpytskyi claimed that three members of the latter’s production team were involved in the decision-making process.
The filmmaker further alleged that only four people from the nine-person voting body settled on naming Ukraine’s Oscars entry, and 75% of that quartet worked on The Guide in some capacity. In a development that definitely wasn’t suspicious, the chairperson of the country’s Oscar committee resigned shortly afterwards, but it wasn’t enough to hold another round of voting in the off-chance The Tribe would win out.
