3 Rooms of Melancholia

A moving but ultimately too arty and affected look at the ravages of the Chechen conflict. Most horrifying are the scenes in a refugee camp, but director Pirjo Honkasalo doesn’t seem to trust the effect of the imagery and the honesty of the children, resorting to an excess of narration. Still, this is a conflict that’s little covered and little understood in the west, and if this film helps to make clear that it’s not the simple “struggle against terrorism” that our allies in an increasingly totalitarian Russia make it out to be, then it serves a good purpose.