Moment of impact
On April Fool’s Day, 1989, Leonid Loktev was hit by a car while crossing a road between two garage sales. In that one instant, he became a different person, an impenetrable being stuck between life and death. Eight years later, his daughter Julia uses her camera to try to understand both the absent fleeting moment and its very present, lasting impact on her family – Russian immigrants marooned in suburban Colorado. Julia attempts to maneuver her camera into the isolated worlds of her father, who has irreparable brain damage, and her mother Larisa, who left her career as a computer programmer to care for him at home. The film chronicles Larisa’s often bizarre attempts to maintain her sanity and sense of humor while tending to the basic human needs of a man whom she no longer knows. The characters in this story exist in a kind of suspended state, a daily repetitious loop, waiting with no end in sight. Moment of Impact is not about mourning a lost past; it’s about coming to terms with an unyielding present.
Moment of Impact won the Cinéma du réel Grand Prix in 1998.
Julia Loktev
She was born in St. Petersburg, Russia, and immigrated to the U.S. at age 9. She has made both fiction and documentary. Alongside her film work, she is also the author of multi-screen video installations, and has exhibited her work in some of the world’s leading institutions.
