The Edge (Край)

First off I guess I skipped out on watching Black Swan, I'm not so great with watching that kind of movie these days.  My friend Mark is a big movie guy and since it's his last week of freedom before he starts work next week we decided to meet up to watch a movie from the Hong Kong International Film Festival.  There were too many choices so we ended up choosing a random movie that would be convenient to go to both in terms of location and time.  We didn't really look too much into this movie, but a quick look at it's wiki shows that it won a nomination for best foreign language film at the Golden Globe awards.

Knowing little about the movie we wondering why it got the category III rating (equivalent to being R-rated).  Thankfully there wasn't any sort of uber-violence though, just a few nude ladies.  The story looks at the main character after WWII.  After finishing his duties at the frontline of war Ignat is hired to work as a train mechanic at a Gulag.  From here on the story is rather complicated to describe though.  However it is pretty interesting.  With nothing much to do at the Gulag most of the story focusses on Ignat's obsession with trains.  It also focuses on the Russian's hatred of a German girl who Ignat finds while trying to recover an old train and Ignat's efforts to protect her.  High production values make for a very believable movie. The story of a protagonist protecting someone from discrimination is uplifting as she finds a way to live without hatred in her life in the end.