A man visits his injured daughter.


PICKLED HERRING is used with permission from Milana Vayntrub. Learn more at https://linktr.ee/mintmilana.


Irina had an earlymorning slip after groggily answering her alarm to take her birth control pill, injuring her leg. Her partner Benjamin has to work, so her Soviet immigrant father Lev comes to visit and take care of her since she is confined to a wheelchair during her recovery.

Lev is eager and loving, but also overbearing, which drives Irina crazy. He wants to fix everything in her apartment and her life, including their broken garage door. But as they spend time together, they clash over everything, from their politics and cultural differences to their temperaments. But their tensions come to a head when Irina needs her father the most and finds he's not around again to help.

Written by Marina Shifrin and directed by Milana Vayntrub, who also plays the lead role, this short family dramedy is a warm yet incisive portrait of a father and daughter fundamentally at odds with one another. Before the film's action begins, the pair are primarily defined by their absence, since they live far apart. But when Irina needs a caretaker after her accident, Lev comes to the rescue, though his strenuous efforts sometimes cause more trouble than they help.

Wellwritten and directed with an engaging, relaxed naturalistic eye, the film's humor has its slapstick moments, but most resonates with the oddcouple clashing of Irina and Lev, played by actor Dimiter Marinov with a fundamental warmth and affection. Lev wants to do and fix everything wrong in the house, bustling about in a frenzy of activity, opinions and projects. He's a whirlwind, and a stark contrast to the more thoughtful, wry Irina, played by Wayntrub with a skepticism that Lev senses but often overlooks.

The storytelling often has fun with their differences, but eventually, those contrasts lead to conflict when Irina truly needs her father in a vulnerable, embarrassing moment and Lev is stuck and embroiled in one of his household projects. It leads to a moment of reckoning for the pair, one in which longsimmering resentments and truths come out that can't be avoided any longer. One of the strengths of PICKLED HERRING is how it is willing to let those uncomfortable truths linger in the air between father and daughter, settling gently between them. It ends in a moment of unique family harmony that's very true to Irina and Lev a begrudging, wellearned one, accepting of one another's cantankerousness, but with a new appreciation.