Indiewire & the Playlist – Jessica Kiang

“Punchy, Difficult, Allegorically Urgent Greek Tragedy: In A Blast, a narrative of personal liberation becomes a political allegory of powerful pessimism. Maria, like her country, may escape the shackles of unfair debt and struggle and poverty, but she can only do it by outrunning her pursuers, leaving a destabilized family behind and eventually facing the future in a state of staggering aloneness. (…) Tzoumerkas refuses to portray Maria as anything so uncomplicated as a victim. Maria is explicitly a woman – wife, daughter, mother, sister – and some of the scenes of most urgent, shocking power come from quieter moments when she simply, clearly negates or repudiates one of those prescribed roles. She quietly tells her counseling group that she never wants to see her children again, she coolly sits across a dinner table from her father, now a widower, and explains in the cruelest terms how unnecessary and revolting he is to her: parricide over a bowl of soup. In fact Maria’s journey can be read as a series of assassinations, of everything and everyone she has ever known.” Read more →