With Short Summer, writer/director Nastia Korkia has created an exquisite, evocative portrait of a rapidly disintegrating world told almost entirely through the eyes of a child. There’s not much plot here, and even less dialogue, as Korkia and cinematographer Evgeny Rodin instead construct moments of impressionistic immersion — the way sunlight reflects off of a piece of glass and streams through curtains, a body lying prone on an old bed, a quiet reverie while hiking through the woods.
Eight-year-old Katya (Maiia Pleshkevich) has travelled with her grandparents to their summer home in the Russian countryside. But conflict with Chechnya is raging somewhere just beyond their borders, and intimations of the war seep into the family’s day-to-day life in subtle yet devastating ways. Katya runs around with other kids who live in the area year-round, those kinds of friends one only encounters annually on vacation, and they do what all children do: play hide-and-seek, toss around balls, go exploring. But the games they play also reveal the world that exists just beyond the periphery of their understanding. The boys pretend to be soldiers guarding a checkpoint, demanding papers from grandpa as the family first arrives in town (he plays along politely). Later. a long, static master shot of an afternoon ball game reveals a slow-moving freight train hauling tanks and armored personnel carriers either to or from the frontlines, while the soundtrack fills with the ambient sounds of radios constantly broadcasting new reports about missing soldiers.
A story does eventually emerge from Korkia’s gradual accumulation of discrete vignettes, filling in at least some details of these people’s lives. The grandparents are in the midst of a divorce, and while Katya doesn’t necessarily understand the concept, she does recognize that there is an acrimonious mood infiltrating their shared home. Grandfather shows her how to pick mushrooms and clean them, a long sequence shot in loving, tactile detail. But grandfather also dodges Korkia’s innocent inquiries about the state of things, instead instructing her on how to spot worms in the mushroom stalk and cut them out. Grandmother lays about, silently, seemingly overcome by sadness, and Katya often lays with her in quiet solidarity. At one point, Katya travels with grandfather to the nearby town, and we get a glimpse of a lively marketplace and bustling crowds. But even here, the banality of state bureaucracy butts up against Katya’s otherwise carefree summer escapades, as we witness the long process of trying to acquire the official paperwork to file for legal separation.
Interspersed throughout these snippets of narrative are long, languid sequences of children frolicking and exploring, although signs of impending disaster are still hovering around in the margins. As the children take a trip through the woods, one of them talks about how the path they’re on has only recently become accessible because the water level from the nearby lake has gotten so low. These kids don’t know, or care, about global warming, but its effects will shape their lives in ways they can’t imagine. Later, Katya will explore a huge concrete cistern that the children discover on one of their adventures, and the film becomes a kind dark, abstract journey into the unknown, as Katya pushes further and further into the recesses of the huge structure. For the kids, it’s still possible to be amazed by the everyday, quotidian things adults take for granted. (While Katya explores, we hear but do not see two people having very loud sex. She does not recognize or register what’s happening, transfixed instead on her own journey into the unknown). All of this is captured in long, mostly static takes. Korkia’s compositions sometimes resemble portraiture, and many scenes feel like a kind of Proustian reverie of a recent past. It’s unclear if any of this is autobiographical, but the film has the undeniably lived-in feel of actual memories. Short Summer is a remarkable achievement, a deeply moving exploration of innocence hovering on the edge of painful experience.
Published as part of Venice Film Festival 2025 — Dispatch 3.
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