We are used to watching stories about children who have been abandoned, leading to catastrophic consequences – they fall victim to drugs, prostitution and abuse of all kinds, or simply disappear. From Andrey Zvyagintsev’s Loveless [+lire aussi :
critique
bande-annonce
interview : Andreï Zviaguintsev
fiche film], where the parents are present but emotionally absent, to Nadine Labaki’s Capernaum [+lire aussi :
critique
bande-annonce
fiche film], in which a forsaken child from the Beirut ghettos sues his irresponsible parents for bringing him into this world, parental abdication can bode nothing good.

In Tudor Cristian Jurgiu’s On Our Own, which has just celebrated its world premiere in the Berlinale Forum, the characters’ parents work abroad, and there is an episode at the beginning in which the adolescent Flavia (Denisa Vraja) plays a domination game with а kneeling boy, Luca (Vlad Furtună), who is in love with her – she slaps him, while in the next scene, she asks him to choke her, just for fun – seemingly preparing the viewer for their sexual deviance at a very early age. But this turns out to be a red herring because nothing of the sort happens later on. Instead, we are immersed in the daily reality of so-called Skype kids, a colloquial term referring to the ongoing phenomenon in Eastern Europe in which children are left with their grandparents while the parents themselves leave for the West in search of higher wages, sending money back home and keeping in touch via videochats.

Here, however, Luca’s grandmother dies, and he somehow manages to organise the burial with his younger sister, Tina (Sofia Vasiliu), without telling their father, who would not bother coming back in any case. While Flavia is not desperately waiting for her mother to return, she also refuses to go and live with her in Italy after her parents announce their divorce, and so she makes a crucial decision – once again, remotely. She forms an improvised commune with two other siblings who have voluntarily run away from home, and this ragtag group of kids and teens take charge of their lives, albeit aimlessly. Their situation quietly suggests the grown-up acceptance that empathy rarely comes from a place we expect it to, and that a lack of care from the ones we love does not necessarily trigger the end of the world.

As a director and co-scriptwriter, Jurgiu acts like his characters – rather than grumbling about the Romanian state having abandoned its citizens, forcing them to seek their livelihoods in the West, in turn making it necessary for them to abandon their children, he focuses on life in the here and now, on the predetermined aftermath and the possible course of events that do not stem from wallowing in trauma and self-pity to the point of masochistic pleasure. Stripped of unnecessary melodrama, the film adopts a healthier approach – imagining a hypothetical reality in which children and adolescents on the threshold of adulthood, in an unnamed city and undisturbed by social services, strive for normalcy despite life’s blows. It’s an imagined reality, of course, but isn’t the very inclination towards a non-tragic outcome itself the path to a non-tragic resolution?

The innocent faces of the young actors allow for broad identification with their situation, while DoP Andrei Butică’s searching yet calm camera, which transforms seemingly insignificant moments into poetry, insists that the beauty of childhood is inalienable and can be experienced regardless of the circumstances. And that the road to maturity, no matter the age, is invariably fraught with thorns.

On Our Own was produced by Romania’s Libra Films, in co-production with Italy’s Indyca. Its world sales are handled by True Colours.