Dvortsevoy deserves praise for making a film willing to show a woman ready to do anything she can to live, unafraid if those choices make her character unsympathetic.

Dvortsevoy, with dense aesthetics and cold atmospheres, offers here a heartbreaking portrait of immigration and maternal sacrifices, which often raises its quota of realism with a rather organic performance by Samal Yeslyamova. [Full review in Spanish]

Yeslyamova's Ayka is the focus of almost every scene, allowing the actress to move from showing bitter tears to becoming doggedly determined, sometimes even within the course of one scene.

The ambiguity that surrounds this desperate woman [is] never approached by Dvortsevoy with false bourgeois compassion. [Full review in Spanish]