USA,
1998, 117 min
Shown in 1998
CREDITS
- dir
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Julia Loktev
- prod
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Melanie Judd
- cam
-
Julia Loktev
- editor
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Julia Loktev
- source
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Melanie Judd, 39 Pearl Street #5F, Brooklyn, NY 11201. FAX: 718-624-3178, EMAIL: mediaties@aol.com
- gga award
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Certificate of Merit, Film & Video: First-Person Documentary
OTHER
Moment of Impact draws us into a family whose lives were irrevocably changed on a summer day in 1989 when Leonard Loktev, an émigré from Russia who had moved with his family to northern Colorado, was struck by a car and left in a near coma. Eight years after the accident, Julia Loktev, his daughter and the filmmaker, has found the courage to make this moving documentary. Loktev takes us into her family’s daily life and exposes her deeply felt love, frustration and pain and that of her mother Larisa—Leonard’s primary caretaker—as they interact with a father and husband who is not the man they once knew and loved. Discussing difficult questions with few answers, Julia and Larisa evoke shattering moments of emotion and loss. Larisa fights against the image of herself as a heroine, wanting to be seen as a woman who is coping in the best way she can with her family’s fate and the reality of her responsibility. Through humor, determination and sheer emotional will, she holds herself together in the hope that her daughter will not take on the same responsibility and will be left free to live her own life. With its glowing black-and-white photography and expressive, deeply poignant family portraits, Moment of Impact is a courageous meditation on the unpredictability of our existence.
—Kathleen Mullen
FACTOID #134
The 1986 San Francisco International’s Discovering Mike Leigh was the director’s first retrospective in the U.S. According to the San Francisco Examiner, Festival Artistic Director Peter Scarlet compared the then-unknown Leigh to Yasujiro Ozu before his work had achieved international recognition; while the latter director had been considered ’too Japanese’ for global audiences, Leigh was considered ’too British.’
