A few years after The Artist (2011) reminded everyone that silent movies exist, a strange film has imbued the term with a whole new meaning. The Tribe, by the tongue-twistingly named Ukrainian director Miroslav Slaboshpytskiy, is set in a dingy boarding school for deaf teens in Kiev. Like a foreign film without subtitles, it plays out entirely in sign language, leaving the average viewer to piece together the plot from the action.

And what action: in this school the bullies are kings, primal violence is the law, and drugs and prostitution are rife. Eerily, all that can be heard on the soundtrack is ambient noise: coughs, the shuffle of feet, moans of pain. At last year’s London Film Festival, The Tribe stunned and disconcerted critics in equal measure.

What	The Tribe
Where	Various Locations \| MAP
Nearest tube	Leicester Square (underground)
When	15 May 15 – 15 Jul 15, 12:00 PM – 12:00 AM
Price	£ determined by cinema
Website	Click here to go to The Tribe's IMDB page.

What the critics say

GUARDIAN ★★★★

'I can’t stop thinking about it. This is a grimly compelling, explicit and violent film which is also a silent movie...It is a bleak but simple picture – at times it looks like Slaboshpytskiy draws on Samuel Beckett or Peter Brook to create a universal language of anxiety. What an intriguing film.'

VARIETY

'The purity of expression Slaboshpytskiy achieves here may well take some viewers back to the silent era, but in finding its own bold cinematic language, “The Tribe” feels like something unmistakably, radically new.'