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I love this movie so much

Such a frustrating disappointment

I think this is a new genre that they're all sort of working their way through it and haven't got all the kinks worked out yet but it's a genre that works for me.

A clunky actioner with a handful of cool moments.

This year is the hundredth anniversary of the Armenian Genocide, and there has been ample discussion of it. Less focused on is the country's recent history. Hiner Saleem's "Vodka Lemon" looks at a Kurdish village in Armenia in the years after the Soviet collapse. Most of the young people have left and the aging population has to resort to near subsistence living. In the midst of this a widower and widow develop a relationship. The people do what they can to survive in a society that's forgotten them. As one person says, the only thing that they have now is freedom.The director is an Iraqi-born Kurd who fled Iraq in the early '80s. I understand that he wanted the movie to reflect the status of the Kurds in general: forgotten by most of the world. There's no doubt that World War I partly caused this for both the Armenians and Kurds. After that senseless war took millions of lives, not only did Armenia get reduced to a small territory without access to Mt. Ararat, but the Kurds didn't even get their own country (nor did the Palestinians).Anyway, it's a good movie. I especially like that we get to hear both Armenian, Kurdish and Russian spoken. It won't be for everyone, but I recommend it.

Problems? You think you have problems? I'll tell you who has problems. People in Armenia have lots and lots of problems. In fact, their main activities seem to be centered around visiting a cemetery in the middle of a snowy, unforgiving landscape, which eventually will thaw only to bring on horrendous mud. There isn't much life here. Some people live with memories of when there was a Soviet Union and things were actually better. Now, they have tiny pensions and hope that their surviving family members who got away can at least send back some money. If no money comes back, people just starve. That is pretty much all that goes on in this movie. As long as you know in advance that it is about desperate people in an Arctic wasteland, and you don't expect much more, you'll like it! I actually liked this movie. I was having a bad week. My refrigerator died, then my front tooth fell out. I still have it a lot better than these Armenians do. For that reason, I feel happy and grateful, if not a bit shellshocked by the stupefying lack of plot, action and dialogue in this movie. Don't get me wrong. There are some very funny scenes in this movie. If you like Jewish or Slavic humor, for example, and you wonder why it is always so black and so bleak, you might want to see this as a kind of modern view about a place where nothing changes, ever. Things are bad, and they stay bad. And then a horseman goes galloping by. In the middle of nowhere. And we can have a cigarette and a shot of vodka, until we run out of cigarettes and the vodka concession closes. Enjoy.

Vodka Lemon is such a great movie by a Kurdish director living in France. The film is full of surrealism (like the horse galloping in the streets and the ending in which the piano moves by itself)and comedy! The beautiful snow covered landscape is extraordinary, the scenes during the nights are best in terms of cinematography. I think this film is Hiner Saleem's best film, after moderately nice "Long Live the Bride...Liberation of Kurdistan", in particular. It shows how Kurdish people living in Armenia influenced by the Russian and Armenian cultures, like drinking vodka-lemon all day, even at the cemetery, while mourning for the dead wife. The story is well organized and weaved, sub-plots works well (like the piano player girl, Zine, and the Avin's marriage with the weird Kurdish man). Vodka Lemon's representation of Kurdish life and culture in Armenia is proper and great I think, Saleem is opening a window that reflects the life of Kurds in Diasporas. He did it before in his first feature "Long Live the Bride..)devrim kiliceditor in chief www.kurdishcinema.org www.kurdishcinema.com

This is a good film -- dark, and funny, and absurd. The setting is post-Soviet Armenia, today. Life is bleak in the Caucasus; the young have either emigrated or, if they have stayed, they've either turned cruel and abusive or are exploited through prostitution or tawdry sexual encounters. Most of the people in village are pensioners, however. Everyone is forced to sell their meager belongings just to get by. Life is tedious -- unemployed men gather in small groups to drink Vodka Lemon and discuss their effete prospects. A widow and widower, strangers, meet during their regular visits to the graves of their deceased partners. A bit of human warm and humor is thus established. But what gives this film its true strength of statement, and sets is tone, are the absurd moments -- it opens with a musician sleigh-riding on his sick-bed; it ends with a piano gliding off down the road into the distance; a man on horseback gallops across the screen at odd moments and for no known purpose. There is no rhyme or reason for the poverty experienced by these characters -- its effects are pointless, random, and unpredictable and absurd.