“Black Snow” Available on Blu-ray at Amazon.com!
A Siberian truck driver named Gosha delivers knockoffs booze and other materials to the remote towns across the frozen tundra. Though not recommended to drive alone on the remote truck routes, Gosha travels eventually bring him back home where he unloads cases of cheap vodka and where he can lay his head down to rest for a short period of time before heading back on the road. While his sister is overenjoyed with his return, Gosha receives a cold shoulder from his father due to Gosha’s unscrupulous and dishonest deliveries of counterfeit products to earn a living. He’s ready to depart on a multi-day journey with a new load of deer meat, traded for extra cases of Vodka to the local drunkards many from the town blame Gosha in supplying their rabid alcoholism. On his journey, his truck breaks down in the remote with a flat tire with no signs of civilization for miles. When he attempts to change the tire, the jack gives way and the truck’s brake drum on the axle falls on his hand, trapping it painfully underneath.
Yakutian films are a little known, independent cinema industry from the Northeast of Russian Siberia, the land also known to the Yakutian people, known as Sakha, as the Republic of Sakha. “Black Snow” is one of those obscure films that flies way under the cinematic radar for most. The 2020 drama-thriller is helmed by writer-director Stepan Burnashev who followed the film after a four-year stint of horror, producing a pair of horror films with the wooded folklore of “Evil Spirits” and a nomadic, zombie-through-the-woods with “Republic Z.” Burnashev retains the darker, mysterious tones but keeps the narrative grounded in reality with a practice day-in-a-life of a real-life Ice Road Trucker and the suffer in silence after a traumatic accident while coinciding with earning a living that makes one do irritational, unsafe decisions. Burnashev also self-produces the film under executive producer Saidem Baryl’s productions.
If you’re ever considering a career change as a stubborn, immoveable truck driver carrying cargo in Siberia, then this is your warning urging you against it. “Black Snow” follows around Gosha (Fedot Lvov), introduced through a candid conversation between other truckers going over the job’s dos and don’ts at a truck stop and dip into Gosha’s troubled past with a previous partner that led him to drive solo. His story brings him home where he unloads contraband vodka for the smalltown residents and either is embraced by family and friends, such as his sister (Ekaterina Khoyutanova after a long time away or hit a roadblock with those within the same groups that either goes unchanged or causing strife with families of drunkard supplied by Gosha’s return. Eventually, all that negative energy Gosha puts out into the world, or mostly in his home village, brings with it bad karma when he breaks down in the middle of nowhere and subsequently crushes his hand under part of an axle while changing a tire. Ivan Popov, Vladislav Portnyagin, and Alexandra Sofroneeva costar as characters who bring more aggravation to Gosha’s already dispirited existence and further pushing him away to do the wrong thing.
With that negative character push, the blame isn’t entirely all on external factors that shape and mold his stern standoff-ish but Gosha is too part to blame as the stuck-in-his-way truck driver has no zero desire to compromise, doesn’t do the job for less, and doesn’t back down. We see this when a friend of his sister’s asks him to bring a handbag to the city to handoff to someone and since he was already headed that way anyway, the task would be no big deal, but Gosha profusely refuses as carrying a handbag just to hand off to someone else is beneath him and not worth his time without a price. All the aloof stubbornness and arrogant indifference Gosha dishes out, radiating like a radioactive glow, in reaction to the environment around him has full blown karma attached to it that comes in the form of his own truck, his means of livelihood, betraying him and, in an instant, drains him of all that he possess as it comes crashing down onto his hand, ironically bringing his time as a truck driver to an end as he can no longer steer a wheel or take care of it’s maintenance. The third act takes a drastic turn of events that flees from melodramatics of family dysfunction and lands into a fight for survival in one of the coldest of territories on Earth and while Burnashev manages to make compelling scenes of body injury and life struggle, the steps that follow leave audiences hanging, wanting more, in Gosha’s snowy survival escape as his story strangely trails off with unfinished business of Gosha’s fate.
Rising Sun Media releases “Black Snow” on a high-definition Blu-ray home video through FilmFest Distribution. The AVC encoded BD-R 50 is presented in 1080p and in a widescreen 1.78:1 aspect ratio. With a writable Blu-ray disc with the purple underbelly and despite the large disc capacity, the codec isn’t perfect and shows signs of decoding misfires with the details not being as sharp as possible but the issues are kept down to a minor blockiness, and the delineation is good and color saturation is good as it’ll exact a drab color scheme of white, black, and brown for a sense of cold bleakness as well as show off the snowy, isolated terrain that provides little contrasts. The film’s graded naturally and the digital image does a fine job reproducing an organic quality. Although the Yucatán people are Asian descent, the culture speaks in a mixture of Russian-Yucatán that’s presented in LPCM stereo with a tense and folkloric orchestrated score by Andrey Guryanov. Dialogue comes over clear and prominent and carries with it levels of depth. English subtitles are available and synch fine with no signs of spelling errors or incorrect syntax structures. Extras include a commentary track with Soho Cinema Club, including Miles Flanagan, Sean Sardi, and Jared Carlson. Also include is a making-of featurette and the international feature trailer. The traditional Blu-ray Amaray case houses shoddy photoshop art that conveys the right film narrative problem and on the inside is an advert card for another Stepan Burashev film, the Yakut horror of “Cursed Land. Fate.” The not rated release has a runtime of 84 minutes and has region A encoding for playback.
Last Rites: My first go-around with Yucatán cinema doesn’t disappoint nor does it leave me satisfying, lasting taste for more but “Black Snow” has all the seedlings of a solid drama-survival thriller, it just needs to truck it down the icy path a little bit more.
