"Unusual, perceptive, slightly off-beat… a sensitive piece of documentary film-making … thanks to Jerzy Sladkowski's kind camera and Oleg's generosity and shy, open heart." – Screen Daily

At 22, Oleg should be entering the prime of his life. Instead he's a work-shy, borderline recluse hemmed in on one side by the intense social anxieties produced by his autism, and on the other by his tyrannical mother, Marina. Marina is determined to "fix" Oleg at any cost by sending him to every crackpot therapist in town, but when she forces him to take part in a local production of Don Juan, he meets a girl and suddenly the claustrophobia of his world begins to fall away.

Taking out the top prize at the International Documentary Film Festival in Amsterdam and Best Nordic Documentary at Göteborg Film Festival, Don Juan is a funny and heartwarming but stoically honest survey of the sometimes unhelpful ways we try to help, or change, our family. Veteran documentary-maker Jerzy Sladkowski has found an incomparable subject in Oleg, whose gentle, unwavering optimism in the face of an uncaring community and an almost beyond parody family life will win hearts and change minds.

"This tender, bittersweet tragicomedy about role-playing within both therapeutic theatre games and family dramas, and the interplay between them, is both subtle and aggressive, speaking volumes about the definitions of normality, abnormality and the dynamics of power and love … a work which can now be called a classic of the documentary cinema." – IDFA Jury Statement