From Omeleto.
A teenager fights for her dream.
PARALLELS is used with permission from Kate Surinskaya. Learn more at https://facebook.com/parallelskatesurinskaya.
Lena is a teenage girl living in the suburbs of Russia. She’s been fighting with her working-class parents to follow her dream: to attend theater school in Los Angeles and become an actor. But Lena’s mother Anastasia in particular opposes Lena leaving the country, having worked hard to build a good life herself.
As the pair fight, Anastasia thinks back to her struggles in 1970s U.S.S.R., where Anastasia faced bullies, couldn’t fit in and found her own dreams of an athletic career often thwarted by her circumstances and her mother. As Lena pursues her dreams despite opposition, Anastasia soon faces challenges of her own.
Directed and written by Kate Surinskaya (who also plays the young Anastasia), this sensitive coming-of-age drama traces the complicated relationship between mothers and daughters and its influence on their respective life paths. Toggling back and forth between Anastasia’s past and Lena’s present, the narrative draws both contrasts and similarities between the mothers and daughters. They may be at odds with one another in choices and temperament, but they often share the same resilience, determination and desire for approval from the people they love the most.
Told with a straightforward naturalism, the storytelling’s strength is the complexity it gives to this dance between longing and independence and how it shapes both Lena and Anastasia. The encounters between Lena and Anastasia, as well as Anastasia and her own mother, are given plenty of time and space to unfold in all their conflict and tumultuous emotions, as the daughters fight for their independence and the mothers attempt to steer them away from mistakes. Actors Kate Surinskaya, Kristina Korbut and Lilian Navrozashvili — as young Anastasia, Lena and the older Anastasia, respectively — all shine in responsive, sensitive performances that feel lived-in, relatable and universal. Underneath their fights is a deep desire to feel seen, understood and supported, as well as a tug-of-war between a parent’s desire for a child’s safety and their eventual acceptance of that child’s independence.
Amid this coming-of-age, Lena and Anastasia find themselves repeating intergenerational patterns and facing similar life developments. These challenges bring certain questions to the fore, asking just how separate we are from our families, and if we ever travel as far from them as we think we do. Taking full advantage of its longer runtime to develop both generations’ stories in depth, PARALLELS shows us that the answers are never that simple. We are our parents’ children, carrying their legacies and struggles within us all the time, and even as we strike out on our winding paths, something within us is always connected.
