Aaba (Grandfather), by Amar Kaushik,
India: 2016
The film takes place in the Indian
state Arunachal Pradesh where foreigners have only access with a
special visa. There is a girl who lives with her very old
grandparents in the mountains. Her mother abandoned her, her father
has passed away. She is one of the best pupils in school but still
living with grandparents deeply rooted in traditions of their tribe.Only a small TV and a radio are thr only signs of the modern world
outside this simple cottage. The grandfather has lung cancer and
without a chance to get healed, his forthcoming death is inevitable.
While the child has to deal with the fact, the grandfather already
begins to dig his own grave, already accepting his fate. The fiction
of this film is very frail and often it disappears behind the ethnographic aspect. Very few words are spoken and the film focus on
observation. Among this 6 films in this short film program, Aaba
is the most laconic one.
The world of the girl´s grandparents
seems to be already in the process of disappearing. When they are
gone the girl will continue her way through school into a new life.
The world revealed in this film will change soon. Aaba is a
beautiful miniature and a gift of 22 intense minutes of pure cinema.
Engiteng`Larok Lukunya (Black Headed
Cow), by Elisabeth Nichols, Tanzania: 2016
The film is made
by teenagers in Tanzania under the direction of Elisabeth Nichols.
Like all the films in this program, it is a Coming Of Age-story
embedded in a certain geographic landscape, this time a village in
Tanzania. The father has decided to marry his teenage daughter to an
elderly man with an implicitness he sells a cow. He accepts no
objection, the mother remains silent. But early in the morning, the
mother wakes up the girl and helps her to escape. In the last shot
wee see the girl hiding in a bush and heading to an uncertain future.
This film is less a miniature but more like a seed, an initial point
to a much more extended story far beyond the visible 12 minutes.
Min Homosyster (My Homo Sister), by
Lie Hitula, Sweden/Norway: 2017
Three girls make
an excursion to the Norwegian Fjords. Cleo is ten and her elder
sister is homosexual. During this excursion Cleo meets her
sister´s girlfriend. Cleo has a lot of questions about her sister´s
relationships and the elder girls answer her with patience. The film
is focusing on an event, a situation. It looks rather like a scene from a
longer film but a scene which includes already the DNA of n imagined
much longer feature film. In cinema the questions of life asked by children
or adolescents often takes place in natural landscapes like in this
film the mighty fjords. The discoverings of the visible landscapes and
the exploration of the more abstract human landscapes happen concurrent. We know this from Renoir´s The River or from
Ray´s Pather Panchali and other
examples from the history of cinema.
The Catch by Holly Brace-Lavoie
from Canada, the animation film Li.Le by Natia Nikolashvik
from Georgia and Terrain de jeu by Maxence Lemonnier from
France complete this wonderful kaleidoscope of short Coming of
Age-films. In Terrain de Jeu a young buy builds a little
refuge in the middle of a forest. Signs from the world around him are
disturbing. A search group of policemen and dogs are walking through
the forest, the sound of helicopters circling the heaven appear.s The
little cabin the boy is installing for himself is literally
the try to define his own place in the world, a quest which is part
of the history of cinema and often present in these sub genres Road
Movie or Coming of Age.
Rüdiger Tomczak
Screenings:
15.02, Filmtheater am Friederichshain,
12.30
16.02, Cinemaxx 1,
14.00
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