Determined to follow the siren’s call of house music and escape the confines of her 90s Eastern Bloc existence, a young DJ’s aspirations are dented when she’s forced to prove the reality of a bogus job on her visa form.
Vibrant Belarus comedy Crystal Swan… [is] sweet and salty. The style is effervescent and the dialogue has a screwball zip.
Screened as part of NZIFF 2019
Crystal Swan 2018
Khrustal
Instead of leaving Minsk for Chicago, where the house music she adores was born, a young DJ’s dream of relocating to the States is threatened by bureaucracy. Dressed like she’s ready to hit the clubs at any given moment, Alina Nasibullina is a ball of fire as Velya, who finds herself stuck in a bleak factory town and at the mercy of dodgy friends, even crazier locals and the US Embassy in Belarus.
“Crystal Swan may be set in the culturally specific context of mid-1990s Minsk, but there are restless young women like Velya… in every decade in every backwater town. A rainbow-haired bohemian butterfly dreaming of brighter lights in bigger cites, Velya is anxious to escape the stifling provincialism of her homeland and seek her fortune as a club DJ in America. At home in Minsk she has a clownish junkie boyfriend… and an eccentric hippie mother… who is a patriotic museum official who strongly disapproves of her daughter's emigration schemes – which only makes Velya’s escape plan more enticing, of course…
On learning that embassy officials will call to check her bogus employment references, Velya feels her American Dream slipping through her fingers.” — Stephen Dalton, Hollywood Reporter