Manuel de Libération

Manuel de Libération, Alexander Kuznetsov, France, 2016, 77', OV with Spanish subtitles, DCP

Yulia and Katia are two young girls who live in a mental institution in Russia and who try to show that they also can live "outside". Their lives have not been easy, having spent all of their childhood and youth going from one orphanage to another, living and preparing for this moment: now it is up to them to show the authorities that they are capable of taking care of themselves.

Russian director Alexander Kuznetsov presents in his new documentary a portrait of Russian bureaucracy and the efforts of his two characters to try and overcome the stigma of mental illness: the law has typecast them since they were small and it is almost impossible to override the disability with which they have been labelled for life. But Yulia and Katia simply want to have a normal, happy life beyond the institution: a job, a house, a family, like any other girl of their age.

The result is a very moving documentary about the life, dreams and yearnings of two young girls. It is a sensitive, necessary and poignant work that questions the mechanisms of which the state avails itself to control that which it does not understand.