Froth review – beautiful but scattershot portrait of an alien world

This atmospheric documentary from filmmaker Ilya Povolotsky takes place in the remote Kola region of Russia, a freezing no man's land inhabited solely by fortune hunters, poachers, and wistful old men armed with thousand-yard stares. It is not entirely apparent if some of what we're seeing in Froth is staged, or even what the film's real intent is, though it unravels as a scattershot portrait of the individuals who have chosen to carve out an existence at what feels like the end of the Earth, intercut with stunning views of the inhospitable landscape – essentially a graveyard littered with lumbering mechanical wrecks and crumbling military bases.

Those who live here might as well be inhabitants of a different planet (indeed, the setting seems primed for a sci-fi film somewhere down the line). The most interesting of the film's subjects is Dima, a charismatic fisherman-cum-poacher who we often see playing with his young daughter, interacting with German tourists in the film's most humorous scene, and later evading the authorities in an unexpected high-speed chase sequence. There's also water-bus owner Alexander and daughter Masha, the latter hoping to make a life for herself elsewhere, despite her father's insistence that she take over the business. Among them, too, we meet an assortment of divers, here to make money from the scrap and sunken wrecks.

The film is intriguing and always beautiful, but opaque enough to eventually frustrate (actually, I would have liked a longer, more in-depth documentary on this region and these people). That's not to say it isn't worth spending eighty minutes in this alien world purely for the sake of doing so. At the very least, Povolotsky's film invites a realisation that is always welcome: a sense of how disparate our existences can truly be, depending on where it is we choose to lay our hats.

Froth is now streaming on True Story.