Don Juan

Oleg is anything but a Don Juan. The 22-year old student from Nizhny Novgorod, Russia's fifth largest city, has never even had a girlfriend. Growing desperate over her ostensibly autistic boy, his mother does everything she can to make him a seducer. A psychologist tries to draw him out, an elderly gen-tleman in a jogging suit gives Oleg advice on how to properly treat Russian women, and he is thrown in the midst of a troupe of pretty girls to play the Don Juan in a stage production. Jerzy Sladkowskis touchingly intimate documentary is a surreal and humorous look at a world that appears to be light-years away from Internet dating and modern forms of therapy. Then again, one can never be too sure if this is actually Oleg's life or fiction, albeit rooted in reality. In 2015, DON JUAN won the main prize for long-form documentaries at the world's largest documentary film festival, IDFA.