My Joy (Russian: Счастье моё) is a 2010 internationally co-produced Russian-language road film directed by Sergei Loznitsa.
It is summer, and young driver Georgy takes his light truck on a trip to another town with a cargo of flour.
There, he picks up a hitchhiker, an old man who recounts to him a disturbing story: soon after World War II, while returning home from the front, a corrupt military officer brazenly robbed him by threatening him with arrest if he did not comply.
They distract him with some neutral conversation, telling him how one of their friends is a mute because someone killed his father in front of him when he was a child.
Early in the war, two Soviet soldiers from a defeated unit cautiously feel their way through the occupied land in the deep German rear.
However, the soldiers regard his pacifism and indifference towards the German invaders as treasonous, so they kill him, rob the house, and continue on their way, leaving the child to his own devices.
Georgy is beaten by the locals and detained by the police, only to be released the next night when another inmate challenges the lone guard to a fight, beats him unconscious, and unlocks the cells.
A military van comes to the village, carrying two servicemen tasked with delivering the body of a deceased soldier to his native place.
Unable to locate the relatives of the dead soldier, they decide to bribe some random people into signing the papers and leave the body to them.
Georgy numbly grabs the old man's pistol and walks out to the road, where he is picked up by a very talkative truck driver, who rambles about the importance of not meddling in other people's affairs.
[1] The film was shot in Ukraine as a condition for receiving money from the Ukrainian Ministry of Culture, but most of the 1.5 million Euro budget came from Germany.
[8] Village Voice (Michael Atkinson) reviewed My Joy as "a maddening vision and one of the year's must-see provocations.