If you’ve ever thought to yourself ‘Making a film: how hard can it be?’, then watch this awkward and inauthentic romance, in which a solid cast of mostly British actors give shaky performances as Ukrainians (not speaking with heavy accents, small mercies). It’s set in the early 1930s, during the Holodomor (or ‘death by hunger’), when Stalin crushed the Ukrainian people with mass starvation that left millions dead.
Max Irons plays a gifted young painter separated from his childhood sweetheart (Samantha Barks) after leaving the family farm to work in a factory in the capital Kiev. They play their parts earnestly as the movie lumbers on, but this forgotten chapter of history deserves to be better told.