Evgeny Mokhorev – Girls from Teenagers of St. Petersburg series (1996)

This is edgy in all the ways I crave for photography to be edgy.

Beyond that I’m not sure what else I can say about it. Except, except… OMFG, it reminds me of Myroslav Slaboshpytskiy’s The Tribe. (TRIGGER WARNING: if you are a person with any sort of trigger, this film will unquestionably be a problem for you; proceed with caution.)

If you haven’t heard of it’s the story of the seedy underbelly of a Ukrainian boarding school for deaf teens. There is zero spoken dialogue; everything is in sign language and subtitles are intentionally withheld.

It’s riveting and brilliant and unconscionably brutal.

It’s also ballsy as fuck–almost every scene occurs in a single uninterrupted long take, which if not up to the standards of someone like Béla Tarr you are pretty much required to overlook the sometimes less than perfect framing by virtue of the fact of how completely batshit fucking crazy camera tai chi several of the scenes are.