Starring: Igor Galijasevic, Duncan Vezain
Directors: Biliana and Marina Grozdanova
Released: 2025
Mood: If you’ve been on a deeply self-pitying bender where the whole world revolves around you and your problems and you need a reminder that bad things happen and life goes on.
The other night I was tired, burnt out, and desperately seeking a movie to fill my evening WITHOUT adding more suckage to my brain. Eastern Western has all-positive audience reviews on Rotten Tomatoes and it’s under two hours long. You can’t really argue with that.
This film isn’t like any other Western I’ve ever seen. No big-name actors, or even C-list actors. No blockbuster action scenes, no CGI effects, and no rapid-fire comedic dialogue. You need subtitles for at least the first half. It’s also quite slow. The trailer makes it look like it has a lot more action than it does. But the pace feels true to how it was to actually live in the late 1800s – not constant shootouts and bank robberies.
All of that might be off-putting if you’re looking for a typical Western. But the perspective is unique, the main characters are interesting, and the cinematography is up there with some of the best in the genre.
Eastern Western spans a couple of decades. It begins with Igor (Igor Galijasevic), a widower immigrant from Eastern Europe, hence the “Eastern” Western. His wife wanted to come to America, so they brought their two-year-old son Ivo. The wife died before the movie begins, but her spirit is a subtle driving force.
Igor lives in a small one-room homestead. His nearest neighbour, Duncan (Duncan Vezain), wants Igor to come help him at his ranch for the winter, and then head west with his family to seek a more profitable future in San Francisco. Igor doesn’t want to leave because his wife is buried there. Duncan makes a strong case for young Ivo needing more experiences and community to grow up well-rounded.
Igor eventually concedes, and we skip ahead to the spring when the group is about to depart. The party now includes Duncan’s wife, his two daughters, and added help from nephew Luka and his friend Caleb.
Everything seems kind of sweet and family-friendly for a bit, but the Old West was NOT sweet and family-friendly. In one fell swoop that you can feel coming but also don’t want to believe will happen, the group loses three people.
The rest of the story is heavy with sadness, but offers glimmers of hope and a pleasing final scene. Especially for horse girls.
Eastern Western excels in two big ways: how well it’s shot, and how real the characters feel.
Let’s start with the cast.
There are only 16 actors in the entire movie, and that includes the toddler AND young man who both play Ivo at different ages. Igor Galijasevic and Duncan Vezain have the most screentime, but they also really stand out.
Galijasevic is quiet and soulful. He does a lot with saying little on camera, and has a natural ease that works well for the character. He feels like a real father because he is – young Ivo is played by Leonardo Galijasevic, the real Igor’s son.
Galijasevic was in a band that Eastern Western’s producer/director/writer sisters Biliana and Marina Grozdanova followed for their 2014 documentary The Last Kamikazis of Heavy Metal. Once you make the connection with a metalhead, his luscious long hair makes sense (and it still works for the movie).
Vezain is also quiet, but as soon as you put him around horses you can see his inner power, and that works really well for playing a strategic, physically capable cowboy like Duncan.
Vezain is also the most fascinating Western actor I think I’ve ever come across. In real life he’s been making saddles for over 30 years, breeding and training horses for 25 years, and he can literally build a wagon from the ground up, wheels included. That’s how he was pulled into the film industry – he can wrangle AND ride.
There’s a scene where the wagon party is being attacked and Vezain nimbly leaps bareback onto a horse and takes off, and anyone who knows anything about riding can see that this is a true horseman who happens to be acting.
The movie was filmed in Montana, and the scenic shots are a visual feast.
Cinematographer Cameron Wheeless doesn’t have a lot of credits to his name, but he clearly knows what he’s doing. There are thoughtful closeups that you wouldn’t expect like wagon wheels in motion, mixed with wide shots of the natural landscape, intimate human closeups, and a few tense action sequences. All of them are done really well,
The Grozdanova sisters immigrated from Bulgaria to the US in the ‘90s, and bring to the story their own experiences as immigrants. They also add their background in documentaries, which, according to interviews, enabled them to be extremely adaptable. They allowed the actors to improvise, and had no trouble shifting which scene to film when there was a cranky toddler who needed a break.
The result was making Eastern Western into what feels like a snapshot frozen in time, capturing a small group of people and a handful of their experiences at a time when literally everyone was a brand new or second-generation immigrant on Native land.
