Blind Loves

This moving, imaginative debut feature from Bratislava-based Juraj Lehotsky is a portrait of four blind people – music teacher Peter, Romany Miro, nervously pregnant Elena and insecure teenager Zuzana. Edited from material gathered over three years, the film proceeds through a series of not so much posed as sympathetically guided re-enactments in which the principles replay incidents from their lives. It’s a stategy made rich by the free, un-self-conscious nature of the ‘performances’ and the spontaneity of their self-expression.

Deliberately intimate, while never invasive, it’s a film that allows and shows vulnerability while never exploiting it. The linking theme, ostensibly that of the special course of love and romance for touch and sound-oriented unsighted people, slowly emerges as something more general: a meditation on the essentials of social identity, attachment, feeling and pleasure. It’s elevated no end by the adventurousness of the filmmaking, including some arresting, often beautiful, formal framings by cinematographer Juraj Chlpík and Lehotsky’s audacious use of animation and superimposition.