In “Our Quiet Place,” director Elitza Gueorguieva tells the visual story of Aliona, her Belarusian alter ego. Up to a point, the two women share a similar background: they both come from former communist states and they both found refuge in a foreign country and a foreign language (French); what differs is that one of them left behind a democratic regime (Bulgaria), whereas the other one – an autocracy (Belarus.) While Aliona attempts to recompose, in the form of a novel, the personal history of her father, a physicist who fell in love with the sea and disappeared in Turkish waters in 1995, and to thus make peace with the ghost of someone who, for the past 25 years, has been neither alive nor dead, the director creates her own visual language by amplifying the tension between dream and reality, poetry and memory. “Our Quiet Place” is not, properly speaking, a film on migration – it is, rather, a film which talks about the past, about escaping, and about reconstruction or emancipation in a language which is not yours. And maybe this is precisely where the advantage lies – in the fact that you can start from zero. (Sorana Stănescu)