There’s a single scene in “Short Summer” that’s worth the price of admission as a group of kids can be seen playing soccer off to the side of some train tracks in the Russian countryside. The sounds of kicking the ball around are overtaken by the rumble of a train carrying at least a dozen tanks and other military vehicles to an unknown destination and while it doesn’t warrant a glance from any of the kids who keep their heads down to focus on the ball, they are all living in the shadow of war, perhaps not having a direct, perceptible impact on their daily life, but nonetheless giving it shape.
The influence of a country in a constant state of war can be seen early in Nastia Korkia’s visually arresting and moderately compelling narrative debut when an eight-year-old girl named Katya (Maiia Pleshkevich) is taken to her grandparents’ home for the summer. A trope for many coming-of-age films where a kid is suddenly cut off from the only world they’ve ever known, Korkia puts a fascinating spin on it when all involved are adapting to a different reality as her parents oblige the two young boys that stop them from entering the village where their parents are, pretending to be a checkpoint officer like plenty they’ve seen before themselves. (Naturally, they ask for a bribe upon noting a broken tail light.) After the parents make their way into a house where they take the boards off the windows, it appears they have to keep their defenses up at all times when someone starts a fire in their yard just for the fun of it and the few people around town seem to be angry all the time.
There’s an emptiness to the world that Korkia depicts as she follows Katya around on her bicycle, surveying a place where there’s not much new to discover in her youth when all that’s left is poverty and destruction. It’s a potent metaphor that she carries around a shard of glass that can refract light, leading to a striking opening shot of a ray of sunshine that fights to break through against the dark. That’s a battle that remains throughout “Short Summer” where the surroundings are unrelentingly bleak and the mere act of depicting them has power when it’s not a view of Russia that’s reached outside its borders in recent years. (Korkia knows a thing or two about channeling negative energy into a positive, having notably made the entertaining doc “GES-2” about the hopes for a power plant once employed by the Kremlin that was to be turned into a museum.)
The film is deliberately paced and could use a little more context at times when all that frames the story is the occasional news from the battlefront that’s left to waft through the air in largely abandoned spaces and Katya is mostly unconscious of the war’s effects, but Korkia quite impressively expresses a toxicity in the air that eventually makes its way into the girl’s family, with her grandparents finally starting to think it’s time to leave. Whereas moments of self-discovery for the young like Katya generally are reason for celebration, they have a dark lining here when it’s likely the reason she’s left alone in the first place is that her parents are too concerned with securing their own safety and any steps towards the future can feel futile. Still, it’s hard not to feel at least some hope when Korkia shows so much promise as a filmmaker and delivers so many striking images.
“Short Summer” will screen again at the Venice Film Festival on September 4th at 10 pm at the Sala Corino.