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The elliptical court-métrage Ina Litovski emerged on the heels of director Anaïs Barbeau-Lavalette's two acclaimed feature-length dramas (Le Ring and Inch'Allah) and it may surprise fans of those pictures. Those longer works exhibited fairly traditional narratives and narrative structures; as an accessory to its length, this short subject pursues a much different goal: it pulls the audience into a kind of Lynchian reverie, a 14-minute tone poem that deliberately leaves many questions open-ended. As co-directed by Barbeau-Lavalette and André Turpin, and inspired by a section of Barbeau-Lavalette's 2011 novel Je voudrais que m'on efface, the short concerns a confused young girl named Sophie. As the story opens, she has somehow taken on an alter ego, that of a Russian character named Ina Litovski with apparent ties to the former U.S.S.R. and Leninism. On the eve of her school violin concert, she bucks expectations, flees from the recital without playing a note, and performs an alternate classical piece in an unusual setting that evokes this new persona. Watching this film, you instinctively want to look for a deeper subtext - cultural or historical symbols buried throughout the work. The film deliberately lacks that; what it sports, instead, is a startlingly dexterous use of semiotic storytelling language, coupled with virtuoso cinematographic technique. As filmed by Turpin, every shot, from close-ups (Sophie extinguishing a cigarette with a mouthful of spit) to broad landscapes (a dream sequence with an unknown musician standing before a Russian building in the show and playing his violin) has a great, trenchant immediacy. Litovski feels connected to Barbeau-Lavalette's other works in the sense that Sophie, like Jessy in Le Ring, is reeling from inept parentage. One senses that her identity-disorder - or need for escape into another realm - can be directly traced to a sad and dysfunctional home life. Litovski is a relatively minor work in the Barbeau-Lavalette catalogue, and was reportedly made as a warm-up to a feature-length version of the said novel. But this is also a beautifully-conceived, affecting short that can stand on its own. It lingers with the viewer for a long while - mainly because the two directors understand that solving any of the film's enigmas could easily destroy its haunting spell.