A Shadow of Dara

After having been desolated by the war with an alien race, Earth has been destroyed. But before this has happened a rebellion commander and her team have managed to travel back in time. Their mission is to find and free the captive ruler of an advanced intergalactic civilisation from the evil hands of the aliens and undo the tragedy.

Kirill Proskura’s ‘A Shadow Of Dara’ has a mysterious opening that stirs up curiosity and brings about a lot of question marks. Intelligently built on an apparently obscure rush after numbers, the first part of the film presents itself very puzzled and intriguing. The trick applied by the director to cause this effect, hooking the viewer from the very first scene, is making the main character, Dehrin-Dara aka A.J., look like an ordinary person at work, while everybody else around him is acting strange asking him to ‘invent’ and provide them ‘important’ series of numbers he can think of. Very strange! This of course will pay off by the end of the film disclosing the truth behind this strange game of numbers and offering a surprising twist to the story by the time it reaches its halfway. 

‘A Shadow Of Dara’ is a story about the feeling of futility in fighting against destiny, about the importance of hope in any engaged fight and about the will to carry on against all odds. We can never be aware about the true circumstances  in which we find ourselves. This ironically, makes our efforts look childish and ridiculous in front of destiny, but triggered by hope and often unaware of what truly lies ahead of us, driven only by the will to succeed, we are able to change history with the smallest of our actions. It is in fact this effort of will, apparently small compared to the great force of destiny that we owe to ourselves and those who depend on us, and it is because of our stubbornness to exercise it that we eventually manage to prevail in life.

Of course Kirill Proskura’s short film can also be regarded as a parable of the inevitability of fate, however, due to the overall tone adopted by the director we had a slight feeling this was a very cyclical story and our beloved heroes had yet to have their final word.

An entertaining, mysterious and spectacular development.