Moment of Impact

Director: Julia Loktev
Year: 1998
Country: USA
Running time: 117 mins
USA

Producer: Melanie Judd
Photography/Editor: Julia Loktev
In English and Russian with English subtitles

With
Larisa Loktev
Leonid Loktev
Julia Loktev

Festivals: Sundance, San Francisco 1998

Best Director Award Sundance Film Festival 1998
This acclaimed film bears witness to the astounding and troubling selflessness of the filmmaker’s mother, Larisa Loktev, a fiercely intelligent woman who has spent so long caring for her brain-damaged, accident-victim husband that she has become accustomed to doing little else. To maintain her sanity she has embellished the daily routines of lifting, washing and feeding the helpless, barely responsive shell of a man, with drily hilarious variations, dance steps, calisthenics, banter to which he rarely responds. Her ingenious attempts to retrieve an active intellectual life are literally incorporated into caring for him: she balances her reading material on the back of his head while she guides him through his exercises. He expresses no gratitude, but anybody with such a rapacious appetite for their food clearly relishes being alive, she reasons. The steady matter-of-factness of her resolve is awesome, and in a series of searching conversations with her daughter she examines the issues that underly her stoic sense of responsibility. — Bill Gosden

“Made with extraordinary intelligence, formal rigor, and not a jot of sentimentality, Moment of Impact documents the everyday activities of Loktev’s parents – Russian émigrés and successful computer programmers – whose lives were irrevocably changed when the father was struck by a car and severely brain-damaged... Moment of Impact, which took the Documentary Directing Award, was the most memorable film I saw at Sundance.” — Amy Taubin, Village Voice, 3/98

“Loktev uses a variety of experimental techniques to tell her family’s story without narration: a historical slide show, medical reports typed out across the screen, crash reenactments with a doll and a toy car. But she doesn’t shirk on intimacy, providing counterpoint with frank conversations between mother and daughter and the stark realities of her father’s condition. His inability to communicate becomes a warped mirror refracting for the camera the needs, memories and desires of mother and daughter.” — Rachel Rosen, Film Comment, 3-4/98