a short history of tractors in ukrainian film

Yet, as the plot thickens on both sides, Pappa remains stubbornly in the middle. Along the way, Nadia finally has the chance to find out more about the family’s closely-guarded past, as Vera’s prickly refusals are softened by collaboration. But Valentina manages to outflank them with her first move and, before the two sisters know what has happened, this ambitious arriviste with her fur coats, her boil-in-the-bag cooking and her petulant demands has set up home in their childhood house.Īs Valentina – aided by a cabal of suspiciously close male friends – works out her best route to a residential visa, the two sisters begin researching how they can save their father from her wicked designs. Short-tempered, strict Vera has no such weakness. Compassionate, idealistic Nadia is (briefly) tempted to indulge him. Knowing that his two middle-aged daughters will disapprove, he furtively goes behind their backs, defending his right to have a last-chance romance. Blinded by Valentina’s twin perfections, he overlooks her vampish exploitation of her assets, and shrugs indulgently at demands for an expensive car, money, and a top-level education for her ‘genius’ son Stanislav. Pappa thinks it was love at first sight, but he’s never been the most emotionally astute of fathers. Alarm bells start ringing, and Nadia and Vera find themselves forced into a stiff entente as they embark on a mission to protect their vulnerable Pappa – a quest which might just end up in them learning more about themselves along the way. He’s going to get married again, to Valentina, a pneumatic, blonde, thirty-six-year-old Ukrainian divorcee.

Their eighty-four-year-old father has fallen in love. But things change abruptly when they hear troubling news. They’ve never been close: in fact, they’ve been engaged in a feud for the last two years over the division of their late mother’s assets. Nadia and her older sister Vera are of Ukrainian heritage: their parents moved to Britain after the Second World War, fleeing the brutality of Stalin’s agricultural reforms. Thirteen years after it exploded into the bestseller charts, I’ve got around to reading this quirky tale of feuding sisters, immigration appeals and late-life love.

A short history of tractors in ukrainian film