This quiet yet terrifying short makes most coming-of-age films seem petty. Set during some unspecified, probably Balkan, war, it opens with a young girl's eyes shrouded in darkness. This initial mix of innocence and murk is troubling, and the film shows how she got there.
Two girls, presumably sisters, run through a bombed rural village, corpses and ruins strewn everywhere - the almost surreal nature of taking a country walk past the occasional dead body is unexpectedly comic. They find refuge in a deserted house, and, as children do, play games with each other. As in LES ENFANTS TERRIBLES, the house becomes a kind of refuge, an illusory site of stability against the outside world.
Prominent in the living room is a bright collage of postcards, including Popes, faraway exotic cities, beaches, landmarks, animals; another enchanted world far away from the ghastliness of here and now. One of the little girls takes a picture of a cow, presumably a reference to Eisenstein, who would compare the massacre of innocent workers with the slaughter of dumb animals.
The ultimate game begins when a convoy of soldiers arrives outside the house. One of these, armed with a rifle, searches it, thinking he has heard a sound. The house suddenly becomes a dark labyrinth, in which the girls can easily get as lost as the soldier, and the empathetic, grimly lyrical style becomes more troubling, fragmented, as they blunder blindly for a hiding place, wrenched apart. They finally find a safe place in the loft, where the girl becomes shrouded in the darkness that opens the film, having learnt to reject innocence and spontaneity in favour of survivalist cunning.
Although the story of two sisters forced out of their home, trapped and hunted in another, has probably serious allegorical implications, the film works just as well as a story of young children forced to confront the brutalities, dislocations and treacheries of the adult world. As such, the actual reality of war becomes transformed into an Alice-In-Wonderland-like site for the testing of pre-pubescent anxieties.
The film is wordless, only the psychosomatic breathings and gasps of the little girls, and the enquiring grunts of the soldier, being heard - if ever a besieged people had no voice it is here.
The director achieves some lovely effects, that breaks the bleak horror we have just witnessed.
Two girls, presumably sisters, run through a bombed rural village, corpses and ruins strewn everywhere - the almost surreal nature of taking a country walk past the occasional dead body is unexpectedly comic. They find refuge in a deserted house, and, as children do, play games with each other. As in LES ENFANTS TERRIBLES, the house becomes a kind of refuge, an illusory site of stability against the outside world.
Prominent in the living room is a bright collage of postcards, including Popes, faraway exotic cities, beaches, landmarks, animals; another enchanted world far away from the ghastliness of here and now. One of the little girls takes a picture of a cow, presumably a reference to Eisenstein, who would compare the massacre of innocent workers with the slaughter of dumb animals.
The ultimate game begins when a convoy of soldiers arrives outside the house. One of these, armed with a rifle, searches it, thinking he has heard a sound. The house suddenly becomes a dark labyrinth, in which the girls can easily get as lost as the soldier, and the empathetic, grimly lyrical style becomes more troubling, fragmented, as they blunder blindly for a hiding place, wrenched apart. They finally find a safe place in the loft, where the girl becomes shrouded in the darkness that opens the film, having learnt to reject innocence and spontaneity in favour of survivalist cunning.
Although the story of two sisters forced out of their home, trapped and hunted in another, has probably serious allegorical implications, the film works just as well as a story of young children forced to confront the brutalities, dislocations and treacheries of the adult world. As such, the actual reality of war becomes transformed into an Alice-In-Wonderland-like site for the testing of pre-pubescent anxieties.
The film is wordless, only the psychosomatic breathings and gasps of the little girls, and the enquiring grunts of the soldier, being heard - if ever a besieged people had no voice it is here.
The director achieves some lovely effects, that breaks the bleak horror we have just witnessed.
