There's a new film coming out called "The Italian," which was made by Andrei Kravchuk. It's been getting quite a bit of critical acclaim and I am very interested in seeing it...although since I'm living in the sticks I'll probably have to wait for Netflix to get it on video.

I've read quite a bit about this film, and although to me it sounds sad it's apparently not sentimental or maudlin and most people who've written about it say that it's a universal story and not as depressing as you'd expect.

Here's a bit about it from The Australian News:

Kravchuk describes it as "an emotional journey with a universal appeal: the child looking for his mother". Speaking from the set of his latest film, outside St Petersburg, he says the film is based on fact. "You're probably aware that five or six years ago the economic situation in Russia was not great. A lot of the kids in those times were washing cars in the streets.

"I spoke to a friend about the idea of making a film about such kids, about their daily life, and then a few days later saw an article in a newspaper about a boy who had learned to read and escaped from an orphanage to look for his mother. That's where the story came from."

Kravchuk is an experienced documentary and television film-maker and prefers to ground his films in reality. The conditions of the state-run orphanage that is the home of five-year-old Vania Solntsev, played with disarming charm by Kolya Spiridonov, appear Dickensian yet are very much contemporary.

The film is set in 2002. Vania could be one of more than 600,000 real-life "social orphans" or abandoned children, looked after by the state. With soaring divorce rates, and unemployment and alcoholism rife in the community, many children are given up to care. Adoption is not usual in Russia and there are enormous bureaucratic obstacles to overcome before it can take place. If a child's parents are still alive, there is little hope of escape from an institutional life.

I am wondering how it would be to watch this movie from the perspective of someone who's actually been in the orphanages. I suspect that it will be very moving - just writing about someone else writing about it is proving quite moving to me...but I still think I'll see it. It's just something I should do.