Zabava.

Zabava Written and directed by Greg Klymkiw. Cinema Zabava, 1999. 22 min., 16mm.

As one of Canada's most imaginative and courageous independent producers, Greg Klymkiw has helped create impressive feature films by such filmmakers as Guy Maddin, John Paizs, Cynthia Roberts, Bruno Pacheco, Alan Zweig and others. Now Klymkiw has revealed his considerable talents as a writer/director with Zabava, a Cassavetes-meets-Shebib-meets-Bergman descent into the lower depths of hoser masculinity. It's Conrad's birthday. His friends want to get him laid, especially because this year his birthday falls on an annual celebration this shaggy misogynist foursome call "man's day." So, it's off to score some Ukrainian-Canadian women at a local zabava, (Ukrainian for party). When shy and awkward Conrad (an engaging Christopher Robertson) meets Kathy (the luminous Tamara Robbins), they hit it off and end up at his apartment. Soon after, his three drinking buddies arrive. While Kathy waits naked in his room, Conrad explains his success to the lads. Bemused, they guzzle beer and insist that the woman he's just slept with is a promiscuous slattern with a predilection for group sex. Tension mounts as Connie, is convinced to ask her if she'll let his friends join them. Rendered in rich, unsparing black and white, Zabava alternates tonally between Conrad's initially good humoured and sensitive encounter with the woman, and a deeply unsettling dread of the possibility of sexual aggression. Unflinchingly honest and perceptive, Klymkiw's directorial debut is a devastating dramatic dissection of just how strangely caring, potentially dangerous, and downright idiotic male bonding can be.