A first fiction feature film by the Russian-born director living between Germany and France, Nastia Korkia, which was presented in the Venice International Film Festival’s Giornate degli Autori line-up, Short Summer catapults us into a fluctuating world; an everyday reality which veers between moments of lightheartedness and moments of fear which are hard to pin down. Both cruel and poetic, Short Summer is a film to be savoured at leisure, a tour de force which forces the audience to adopt the rhythm of a reality where observing is more important than taking action and feeling is more important than understanding.

The film’s protagonist, Katya (Maiia Pleshkevich), is eight years old and spending the summer with her grandparents in the Russian countryside. There’s not much to do, and Katya and her friends try to occupy their time as best they can. Time seems to stand still in this desolate place, as if someone had turned out the light unexpectedly, leaving the landscape and the people inhabiting it in a troubling half-light. Evgeny Rodin’s magnificent photography conveys these crepuscular atmospheres - only penetrated by mere flashes of light - with delicacy and grace. Katya is the one who decides what to show us of her daily life, of her world as a child surrounded by adults waging war. Although the place where the young protagonist finds herself seems partly spared from armed conflict, fleeting yet incisive details help us to understand that violence and a wave of destruction are just around the corner. The scene where a group of children are playing football as a freight train transporting tanks passes behind them, and another where one of Katya’s friends reads a notice about a war veteran suffering from PTSD who has disappeared, are particular powerful in this respect. Children grow up and the war continues to claim victims, two seemingly contradictory realities which are nevertheless forced to coexist.

Short Summer tries to show, through suggestion rather than insistence, how the horrors of war and the fear of suddenly finding oneself thrust into the eye of the storm stubbornly insinuate themselves into the daily lives of human beings for whom survival has become an everyday reality. Katya’s world and the relationships she forges over the summer at her grandparents’ house, are suddenly upended by tiny details resulting from the armed conflict raging around her, which aren’t ever entirely clear. Whether it’s news of terrorist attacks on the radio, military planes cutting through the sky like sharpened knives, or death certificates unable to be released because bodies on the battlefields can’t always be found, Katya’s childhood is definitively scarred by a far-off yet highly present violence.

By way of Short Summer, Nastia Korkia creates some sort of endless cinematographic diary by harvesting the fragile memories of a little girl who observes the world around her with stupor but also with the knowledge that everything could disappear from one day to the next. Thanks to Katya, the audience is urged to observe seemingly banal details, which become fundamental testimonials of an innocence which is on the verge of vanishing. Mostly composed of masterful sequence shots which parade past the audience’s eyes like Caravaggio paintings, Short Summer is bursting with chiaroscuro, with a light which tries to overcome the shadows and which returns hope to those who often don’t believe they have anything left to hope for.

Short Summer was produced by Tamtam (Germany) in co-production with Totem Atelier (France) and Art & Popcorn (Serbia).