Blue moon

Blue moon

(Blue moon), Andrea Maria Dusl / RAK, 2002
German-Slovak-Ukrainian-English version / English subtitles / simultaneously translated into Czech, 90 min

It is love that leads Johnny Pichler from the West to the East of Europe, first to Slovakia, then to Ukraine – finally down to Odessa, the mystic port by the Black Sea. An escape pushes stoic CIT messenger Johnny with the infatuating Shirley from Austria to Slovakia. Before he can really get to know her, she disappears. On his search for her, which is rich in grotesqueness, dangers and lovers, he eventually finds her twin sister Jana. It is the future that Shirley is looking for in hotel rooms and that makes her escape love. It is the past that traps taxi driver Jana in the Ukrainian town of Lviv and that makes her keep secrets. Andrea Dusl’s motion picture debut is a modern fairy tale about the love between East and West, about a fulfilled yearning and the discovery of a continent. It is a road movie that leads us into the unknown East, into this world next door, which for decades– closed up by the Iron Curtain – hid its own way of life and bizarre exotica.