A Film a Week - Pixie. The New Beginning / Skrzat. Nowy poczatek

 previously published on Cineuropa

We might pretend it’s not true, but children can be cruel and manipulative. They can inflict a lot of pain, and even torture, on peers of theirs who do not fit in with the group. Being the new kid somewhere and not meeting the unwritten “standards” of the environment can sometimes constitute an almost hopeless situation. This is the case for the protagonist of Krzysztof Komander’s feature-length directorial debut, Pixie. The New Beginning. This film, clearly targeting younger audiences, premiered in Locarno Kids, enjoyed a decent run while in domestic distribution in Poland and competed at Schlingel before playing in the Zagreb Film Festival’s KinoKino sidebar.

Despite being 11 years old, Hania (Amelia Golda) still believes in pixies, the mythical creatures that her mother (Agata Turkot, in flashbacks) taught her about, and she is more than willing to express and defend her beliefs. Unfortunately, she is the new kid in a provincial school, and her peers are way less naive than her, so she ends up at the bottom of the bullying “food chain”. To make things worse, her single father (Arkadiusz Jakubik, from I’m a Killer and Clergy) has too much work as a professional fireman to cater to his daughter’s emotional needs.

In a deal struck between the dad and the class’s teacher (Anna Smolowik), Hania is introduced to the teacher’s son and another bullied “bottom feeder”, Michał (Maksymilian Zieliński), who is a science nerd. After a bit of a rocky start, the two arrange a deal: he will “invent” a pixie detector so that she can prove herself right, and the rest of the class wrong, regarding the existence of these creatures. In a stroke of pure luck, the two stumble upon a nervous and mischievous male pixie called Sindri (voiced by Borys Szyc), who says he is willing to reveal himself to the world if the duo can complete a series of tasks…

Of course, the whole pixie thing is just a metaphor for clinging to something from a past that seems less traumatic than a present marked by grief. Even younger children, if they have some movie-watching experience, can guess this pretty early on, and this jeopardises the rest of the movie, in a way. Komander has complete creative control of the filmmaking process as the director, screenwriter and editor, with the latter being his primary profession. The trouble is that he lacks a pair of fresh eyes to trim off some of the unnecessary repetitions and reduce the running time, which comes close to 100 minutes.

The problem is that the repetitions are not fully used to develop the two leading children’s characters beyond the level of archetypes with a couple of specific characteristics each, so the talented but inexperienced actors are cornered into giving one-note performances. The adults in the cast have more leeway to vary their characters, but they are usually used for the purposes of some gentle humour or releasing the pressure, since the altercations between the children are presented in an almost naturalistic way.

Although Wojciech Frycz’s score highlights the predictability of the plot and the points Komander wants to make, the rest of the technical aspects serve as a glue, of sorts. This is especially true for Natalia Anna Matejka’s lively production design and Dzvinka Kukul’s costumes, as captured by cinematographer Piotr Dudak’s kinetic camerawork. All things considered, Pixie. The New Beginning might fall apart under the scrutiny of an analytical adult viewer, but it possesses enough warmth and emotion to please its primary target audience and to convey a positive message.

A Film a Week - Greetings from Mars / Grüsse vom Mars

 previously published on Cineuropa

Much like Marc Rothemund’s Weekend Rebels, which played last year at the Zagreb Film Festival, in the KinoKino sidebar dedicated to younger audiences, Sarah Winkenstette’s Greetings from Mars, which is being shown in that same sidebar this year, takes its core subject of autism quite seriously. It is not used as a gimmick to propel comedy or drama around the young protagonist, but it is an integral part of his personality. Judging by its festival track record so far – a prolonged tour sprinkled with a handful of awards – the approach has paid off.

Our ten-year-old hero named Tom (Theo Kretschmer) is growing up with two siblings in a single-parent household. Since their father passed away recently, the mother, Vera (Eva Löbau, recently glimpsed in The Teachers’ Lounge, has little choice but to agree to a four-week business trip to China. For Tom, his daredevil brother Elmar (Anton Noltensmeter) and their teenage sister Nina (Lilli Lacher, glimpsed in last year’s Berlinale title Ivo), it means that they will have to spend that part of the summer holidays with their paternal grandparents, Horst (Michael Wittenborn, a character actor seen in Toni Erdmann and All Quiet on the Western Front) and Hanna (Hedi Kriegeskotte, mostly active on television), who are still coming to terms with their son’s passing.

Tom is interested in space exploration, and his dream is to become an astronaut and visit Mars. He can flood anyone who’ll listen with a ton of facts off the top of his head, on this and other topics, but he has a hard time managing everyday challenges, like seeing the colour red, hearing loud noises and enduring unwanted physical contact from anyone other than his mother. Tom sees staying with his hippie-like grandparents in their house with a red front door and no rules as a training mission for his future career as a space explorer. He has even found some ideal mission-related roles for his siblings, while the mystery surrounding the disappearance of an asteroid keeps his mind occupied. As is usually the case, adventures and new challenges will ensue…

Although it is pretty clear from the get-go that Tom is different from his (neuro-)typical siblings, the diagnosis is not uttered until the third-act climactic scene. That decision shows a certain seriousness and respect for the topic that Sebastian Grusnick and Thomas Möller dealt with in their book, which Winkenstette tries to adapt for the screen. Theo Kretschmer’s lived-in, but also measured, acting helps the cause as well, while the rest of the cast have no trouble striking up their own chemistry with the young lead and with each other.

However, some of the solutions that Winkenstette opts for are quite run-of-the-mill, such as Jakob Berger’s hand-held camerawork, while the on-the-nose score by André Feldhouse gets overbearing in its attempts to constantly spell out the desired emotional tone. But the film is actually saved by Nicole Kortlüke’s editing: not just because the animated material is deftly blended with the live-action shots, but also thanks to the roughness of the montage sequences when Tom gets agitated: in this way, the movie presents what is happening in his head in a compelling fashion.

In the end, Greetings from Mars accomplishes its mission of exploring and presenting “foreign inner universes” to neurotypical audiences with great empathy and warmth. Both children and their parents could learn a thing or two from Sarah Winkenstette’s film.

A Film a Week - Weekend Rebels / Wochenendrebellen

 previously published on Cineuropa

According to the statistics printed on a textual info-card during the ending of Marc Rothemund’s Weekend Rebels, one in every 100 children is autistic. Since autism is a spectrum, the manifestation of it and the needs of autistic people are diverse, so they very much depend on the response from their immediate environment – especially its understanding, acceptance and support.

Rothemund’s film is based on the true story of Mirco and Jason von Juterczenka, which was previously published as a blog and a book by Mirco himself. The Zagreb Film Festival has screened it in the Kino Kino competition, which showcases children’s flicks.

Jason was born with Asperger’s, which prevents him from functioning as neurotypical kids do. As the specialist informs his parents, Mirco (Florian David Fitz) and Fatime (Aylin Tezel), he can develop special interests and thrive by pursuing knowledge about them, but he needs a strict set of rules to abide by as well as their constant love and support. Jason (newcomer Cecilio Andersen) grows up to be a smart, curious boy interested in space, advanced physics and the preservation of the environment, but is also attached to some of his routines and rituals that make little sense to others.

At school, he is not accepted by his peers, and he sometimes reacts to their provocations with violence. One thing he gets from them, however, is the notion that he needs to pick a football club to support. Since his parents support different teams, he forges a system to test all of the German professional clubs against his set of rules so as to find the one he should support. Mirco volunteers to take him to games across Germany, which comes as a relief to Fatime, who is exhausted from caring for Jason and his needs.

Insights from Grandpa (Joachim Król) and from other football fans might come in handy, but Jason has to learn how to put up with a world that irritates him with loud noises, vivid colours, involuntary touches and situations that bring his rules into conflict with one another. Can Jason learn how to stand this outside world that he cannot control in order to fulfil his goal?

Weekend Rebels is clearly a film with a positive message of patience, tolerance and understanding to convey, which it does through the simple, but efficient, script by Richard Kropf. Marc Rothemund, best known for his acclaimed 2005 Berlinale title Sophie Scholl: The Final Days [+], directs it in a fitting, not overly obtrusive, way that is still dynamic enough to hold the attention of the target audiences – kids and their parents – even in the slightly repetitive scenes and sequences. The dynamic camerawork by Philip Peschlow in bright and vivid colours certainly helps, and so do the striking sound design by Lena Beck and the rapid editing by Hans Horn and Chris Mühlbauer. The omnipresent, gentle music by Johnny Klimek and Hans Hafner is, on the other hand, a bit too on the nose in its attempts to dictate the viewer’s feelings.

The acting is also solid throughout. Cecilio Andersen is bubbly and believable in the role of Jason, while Florian David Fitz imbues Mirco’s character with the gentle energy of a father willing to go the extra mile to please his son. On the other hand, Aylin Tezel does not have that much work to do as Fatime, but veteran thesp Joachim Król steals a few scenes as the football-loving Grandpa. In the end, Weekend Rebels overflows with warmth and empathy.

A Film a Week - Block 5 / Igrišča ne damo!

 previously published on Cineuropa

Life is not easy for a new kid on the block. At a certain age, moving seems like a total reset: with a new neighbourhood also comes a new school and the obligation to make new friends and fall in with a crowd that has already been there and shares a certain, established dynamic. Having a cause in common (or creating one) might help, but it might also drive a deeper rift between the kids’ and the adults’ worlds. This is something that we see in the new film by versatile Slovenian filmmaker Klemen Dvornik, Block 5, which premiered at Locarno, in the Locarno Kids sidebar, and is now screening at Sarajevo, in its Children's Programme.

Our protagonist, preteen girl Alma (Kaja Zabert), has just moved into a flat in a housing block in Ljubljana with her father, Filip (Marko Mandić, seen recently in Sonja Prosenc’s Family Therapy and Hanna Slak’s Not a Word). Life seems hard for her, since the same gang of skateboarding kids bullies her at school as well as in the neighbourhood. Once she finds out that her father is handling the development project that will turn the block playground, complete with its skating park, into a car park, she reaches out to them, so they all overcome their differences and form a pact to put a stop to it. Alma has a deeper personal reason to take part in this environmental project, since her mother died on such a mission in the Amazon. The adventure, which resembles a war game between the kids and the adults, begins, and along the way, animosities will be turned into friendships and a sense of community will be forged.

Working from a script written by Croatian-born, Ljubljana- and Prague-educated writer-filmmaker Dora Šustić, Dvornik demonstrates his versatility and eye for detail. Although they both occasionally rely on clichés, they manage to capture the life of kids and adults in a complex neighbourhood that is ethnically mixed and has class divisions, much like most of the estates on the outskirts of Ljubljana. Dvornik also shows he has a decent knowledge of contemporary young-adult culture, as he insists on TikTok-style interludes of vertical videos of their skating shenanigans set against a background of contemporary trap-pop music.

The director also knows how to work with young actors and newcomers, when to give them directions and when to step back so they can create their own interplay in an organic way. It results in great chemistry between them, with Kaja Zabert and Kaja Šuštar (who plays Alma’s nemesis-turned-best friend Luna) being standouts, while the rest of the young cast also fare pretty well. The adult cast members, except for Marko Mandić, reliably good in his role, have bit parts, and some of them, such as Ivana Roščić (playing Luna’s mother), Enes Bešlagić (playing a local kebab parlour owner) and Gregor Zorc (playing an unemployed man who wants to stick it to the system and therefore shows the most empathy for the kids’ venture), imbue their characters with life, while Tihomir Stanić (who plays Filip’s boss, Brabec) nails the vibe of the main villain.

Shot observantly by Czech DoP David Hofmann, who captures the details that could easily have been neglected by a cinematographer more familiar with the setting, scored by David Herceg to highlight the emotion in a discreet way, and edited vibrantly by Ivana Fumić, Block 5 is a film that should find fertile ground with elementary-school children, while also keeping their parents’ and teachers’ thoughts occupied for 80 minutes.

A Film a Week - Cricket & Antoinette / Cvrčak i mravica

 previously published on Cineuropa

We all know the tale of the cricket and the ants, and the moral of the story: a fun-loving, lazy cricket gets punished for his lack of organisation, preparation and hard work once the winter comes. That kind of moral, which champions only one type of behaviour and the character traits it entails, while disparaging the other possibilities, could easily serve to create divisions and an atmosphere of intolerance within society. It is evident that the fable told by both Aesop and de La Fontaine needed a sort of overhaul to fit the needs of the more complex contemporary world. That task was undertaken by a group of Croatian creatives at the Diedra animation studio, and the result is the first Croatian feature-length 3D animated film, Cricket & Antoinette, which has gone straight into theatrical distribution domestically, while the global release will follow later this year.

The foundations for the new reading of the old tale were laid by Darko Bakliža in his 1999 stage play for children, and this was adapted into a script by Luka Rukavina, who also directed the film, and Rona Žulj. It tells the story of a cricket musician and band frontman, Ket, and the ant princess Antoinette. While he is a typical fun-loving and creative cricket, she is more easy-going and less well organised than the rest of her ant colony, which adheres to strict rules. After a chance encounter between the two at the Roachella music festival, a strange affection ensues. Ket follows her home, only to get in trouble with the law at the ant colony, and Antoinette saves him out of gratitude. She then feels the urge to warn the crickets and the other bugs at the festival of the upcoming winter, which they all see as a myth and so pay little attention to her words. Maybe it would be easier if she could sing it to them. But can an ant sing? Can crickets accept the concept of preparation? Could these two different worlds come together, especially when certain forces want to keep them apart?

The story has a universal appeal and is suitable for family audiences, mainly children and their parents. Although it is his first work in the field of feature-length animation, Rukavina has previously gained a lot of experience with both animation (as a dubbing director for the Croatian releases of major animated flicks) and its target audience (as a director of numerous short documentaries for children and youth TV programmes), so he keeps the key ingredients well balanced. The dialogue is quick and snappy, an element of relaxation comes in the form of the songs composed by Gordan Muratović (better known as accomplished pop musician Coco Mosquito), which are quite catchy and are slickly blended into the sound design by Vjeran Šalomon (who also wrote the score), and the visual design features made up of richly textured objects (with some use of macro photographs for the backgrounds) and models in enhanced, but still natural-looking, colours really fit the bill. Technically speaking, Cricket & Antoinette might not be a shining example of the most modern 3D animation (since the project spent quite a long stretch of time at various developmental and production stages), but it is still groundbreaking in the national context, and its retro and slightly naive style serves as a perfect vessel to deliver this new moral of the old story to the widest possible audience.

A Film a Week - Beanie / Kapa

 previously published on Cineuropa

Wonders do happen around Christmas time in Ljubljana. They might not be something we wished for, exactly, but they still have the ability to surprise us. Santa exists, yet there is not only one, but rather a whole syndicate of them. A dog that falls into our laps as a gift from the heavens might not be the right breed or might only have three legs. And a thieving vending machine might dispense its sweets and also spit out all of the money it had stolen before.

At least this is the case in Beanie, the third feature by Slobodan Maksimović. The film is branded as the first Slovenian Christmas movie, and it has been touring the specialised festivals (and the specialised children’s programmes of the regular film festivals) since the spring. Its national premiere is scheduled for the Festival of Slovenian Film, which is now under way. Beanie has already been dubbed into several languages and will enter distribution in various territories, including its home country, in November, just in time for Christmas.

All Lučka (newcomer Kaja Podreberšek) wanted for Christmas was a baby sister and a puppy. All Erik (Gaj Črnič, also a newcomer), who is also called “Beanie”, for obvious reasons (he always has his beanie on), wanted was to spend the holidays with his parents. Instead, he won the lottery at the home for youths where he lives (and where he is bullied), and the prize was to spend Christmas Eve with Lučka’s family. Their last name is Božič, which means “Christmas” in Slovenian, and this is exactly the joke that the home’s headmistress, Ana (Mojca Fatur), tries to crack.

So, instead of getting the presents she so desired, Lučka has to spend a hygge-style Christmas with her posh, yet absent-minded, parents Barbara (Ajda Smrekar) and Boris (Croatian actor Frano Mašković), and this boy from the youth home who has the strange habit of wearing his beanie at all times. Her initial discontent does not evaporate so easily. When she wakes up in the middle of the night, thinking that she has seen Santa coming to her house, Erik follows her, first in an attempt to prevent her from doing something stupid, then to protect her, and eventually taking the lead in their shared adventure. Christmas Eve in Ljubljana can be scary, but also magical.

Engagingly written by Saša Eržen, well acted and cleverly directed, Beanie could be regarded as one of the best children’s Christmas movies. The concepts it deals with are simple, but they can also be refined, strike a deep emotional chord and tell a meaningful truth (for instance, that kids love their parents even if they are good-for-nothing drunks). Furthermore, the chemistry between the young actors is natural, while the more experienced thesps pull some simple, effective stunts, and the sense of directing, opting for predominantly wider shots to put an emphasis on the atmosphere, while adding emotional significance to the close-ups, is spot on.

Beanie’s technical qualities are also top-notch. Sven Pepeonik’s cinematography captures the touristy and the not-so-touristy Ljubljana in the holiday period, while Jurij Moškon’s editing is fairly seamless. Michal Novinski’s score, using a wide range of instruments and evoking a neoclassical and jazzy mood, follows the emotion of the film perfectly, and the animation and visual effects by Michal Struss are also a valuable addition to the movie.

In the end, kids will enjoy Beanie, while the parents accompanying them should also remain interested in it. One can only appreciate all the effort and the emotion that must have been invested in such a project.