Fantastic!

Absolutely Fantastic

If you like to be scared, if you like to laugh, and if you like to learn a thing or two at the movies, this absolutely cannot be missed.

This is one of the best movies I’ve seen in a very long time. You have to go and see this on the big screen.

The movie's love story between the blind-since-birth Lilly and the just-gone-blind Jakob is adorable, cute, lovely ... and totally predictable. Other characters like Lilly's mother and sister are only briefly shown as somewhat weird people whose behavior is mostly following clichés or otherwise leaves a lot of questions with the audience without exploring it further.Fritzi Haberlandt's acting is superb. This is about the best thing about this movie.Having worked in a social project with blind people, I could not help to think throughout the movie that the plot was quite flawed. Lilly walks around with her white stick in a neighborhood she has never been to before. She asks her friend and mother to just leave her alone at some desolate gas station/restaurant in the middle of rural Russia. "C'mon, get real!", I wanted to shout. Only a suicidal blind person would do that. And no decent person with eyesight, let alone her own mother, would do that to her.The movie was trying to get the message across, that going blind is not the end of your life. That there are still many things you can enjoy, if you only make the effort to attend special training, re-organise your life, and learn to "see" the world in a different way. Agreed. What the movie completely fails to show is the reality that without a guide person a blind man or woman is completely lost outside his/her familiar surroundings.

This film started out very promising with the story about a director who loses his sight and a blind woman who is bound to help him. However, somewhere in the middle it seemed like the script writers didn't know where to go from there.One unbelievable event followed the next (Russia must be very small because they are all bumping into each other all the time), the motivation of the female lead character comprehensible (why does she still follow him after they got off the ship? Why doesn't she try to borrow a mobile phone on the ship to call somebody?), the side stories were completely ridiculous (was the story with the mother and the boyfriend supposed to be funny? And what was the story with the younger sister about?). Still with all this seeming arbitrariness of the plot, the movie managed to be completely predictable.The saddest thing about it is that there was a lot of potential. As I said, the idea of the film was good, the visuals and the score were very beautiful and the actors of the main characters were good, too. So this could have been a really good film... but it wasn't.

To my mind this movie is a really outstanding production. The actors deliver superior performances, the script is wonderful, the pictures just beautiful and the music makes it to a masterpiece....This movie is about a young director for stage plays who becomes blind due to a car accident. Of course he can't handle the situation, is confused and desperate. He meets this girl who is blind since her birth. She works for a rehab center and wants to help him to manage his life.... Somehow I don't wanna tell more: It turns into a road trip to Onega, Russia, where he wants to visit his mother who is going to die.Definitely a must see movie!

I am so tired of boring, normal love stories as well as deep, sorrowful cinema. In this movie, I found the perfect combination of these two.Without humor, it would be a normal love story, with blind people, but still a love story. I think, this film doesn't want to show the problems of blind people in detail or how a person, becoming blind deals with it. It is a modern fairy tale. And it's a very good one! It is a perfect film for a couple who want to have a romantic, nice evening. If you liked this movie, you might also like "Jenseits der Stille", a movie about deaf people and a love story as well.9/10