Wenn der Krieg zum Alltag gehört

From Britta Schmeis

It is the first six or seven minutes that set the rhythm, the poetic slowness of the film: A barren summer landscape can be seen, the sounds of a rickety car can be heard and fidgety plays of light can be observed. A girl sits in this car, holding a shard of glass in her hand and trying to catch the sun's rays. It is one of the central motifs of Nastia Korkia's feature film debut "Short Summer" and one of the many delicate details in this multi-layered, melancholy, gently flowing work.

Nastia Korkia tells the story of seven-year-old Katya (Maiia Pleshkevich), who spends the summer of 2004 with her grandparents in the countryside. War is raging in nearby Chechnya. For Katya, it is far away and yet the signs are clear: with a friend, she finds a flyer looking for a deserter, fighter jets fly over their heads and while the children play football, a goods train with tanks rattles past. "Katya sees the war, but she doesn't understand it, perhaps she doesn't even realise it," says Nastia Korkia. She talks about a childhood, carefree and yet burdened. She wanted to make a film to understand the country in which she grew up. "It's not my childhood memories. It's more of a family story against a larger backdrop."

Speechlessness in the private and political spheres

It is also a film about speechlessness. Katya asks questions to which she gets no answers. Her grandparents are in the middle of a divorce and Katya wants to know who will live where in the future and what will happen next. But her grandfather (Aleksandr Feklistov), who has a new girlfriend, refuses to give her any answers. Her grandmother (Vesna Jovanović), with whom Katya has a tender, loving relationship, seems to have lapsed into a bitter silence. "My experience is that war and its effects are always present in people's everyday lives, but people prefer not to talk about it," says Nastia Korkia, who was born in 1984 and therefore experienced the Second Chechen War (1999-2009) not as a child, but as a young adult.

On the surface, not much happens in this film. Instead, the film follows Katya as she spends her days in summer idleness, roaming the countryside with other children. She is often a distant observer, an accidental witness, for example when a woman tries to get a death certificate for her fallen but missing son at the office, or when her grandfather briefly meets his new partner during a visit to the city. The two can only be seen far away and through a window. Evgeny Rodin's camera rarely lingers on the people or even their faces; it mostly shows the big picture, in which the people are small figures. It is about observing, and also about looking closely in order to grasp things, to feel them.

"There's something magical about childhood memories"

And so "Short Summer" is also a very sensual film that allows for many interpretations. Nastia Korkia made a conscious decision to shoot on 16-millimetre film. The lower resolution and the coarser grain have something unmediated about them. "For me, childhood memories always have something hazy and magical about them," she says. She also deliberately chose the shard of glass with which Katya repeatedly creates plays of light. "I didn't want to give her an ordinary toy, but to show how a child can be inspired by everyday things and use them to create beauty."

Nastia Korkia and her co-Script Writer Mikhail Bushkov had the idea for the film before the Russian war of aggression began, but then the material became sadly topical. The parallels between how war has become part of everyday life in Ukraine and in neighbouring countries are obvious. Nastia was living in Belgium to study when the war broke out and decided not to return. Her Russian Executive Producer Natalia Drozd was already living in Hamburg at the time. "I knew it would be best for the film if I also went to Hamburg," recalls the Director and Script Writer. A decision that proved to be the right one.

Hamburg-based Tamtam Film executive producer

In May 2022, Andrea Schütte and Dirk Decker from the Hamburg-based production company Tamtam Film met Natalia Drozd in Cannes and decided to work together. "We were immediately convinced by the project because Nastia's short films promised great talent and because the script was perfect and beautifully written," enthuses Andrea Schütte. She was fascinated by the intense atmosphere, the touching nature of the narrative and the fact that not everything was explained.

Tamtam Film is the Executive Producer of the German-French-Serbian co-production. "We were and are very lucky with our location in Hamburg, the decisive attitude of MOIN Film Fund towards complex projects and the early financial support for this project, because the city and the cultural sector are very cosmopolitan," says the Executive Producer. This has opened many more doors for the film. MOIN funded the film with 230,000 euros. After its world premiere in Venice, it will now celebrate its German premiere at the Filmfest Hamburg on 28 September, after which it will go on a worldwide tour. It has already been invited to numerous festivals, such as London and Ghent, with others to follow.