Vodka Lemon

Two elderly gentlemen sit on the roadside and discuss their country’s Soviet past. “They pretended to do everything for us, and we pretended to do everything for them.” His colleague suggests things are no better now, “Now we have to pay for gas, electricity, water we have nothing left but our freedom.” Having endured decades of Soviet control, not to mention devastating earthquakes and a horrifying genocide, it’s hard to imagine how such an idiosyncratic film could arrive from a county still displaying the scars of such hardship. However, Hiner Saleem’s deceptively shrewd and restrained 2003 comedy about western immigration and the lives of those left behind makes for a charismatic excursion to the glacial steppes of rural Armenia.