Short Summer

Eight-year-old Katya is spending the summer with her grandparents in the Russian countryside. She and her friends play soccer, hide and seek, and roam the nearby fields, their lives adopting the languid rhythms of the season. Amid the rolling hills and serene landscapes, time seems to stand still. Yet all the while, a war is raging on the periphery, intruding on daily life in ways both large and small.

Drawing on real-life memories from her upbringing in the early 2000s during Russia’s Second Chechen War, director Nastia Korkia carefully crafts a picture of a childhood coexisting with chaos and conflict in which violence seems to lurk around every corner. Featuring some of the year’s most stirring, thought-provoking images and a textured, earth-toned visual palette, Short Summer is an unforgettable, atmospheric vision of growing up in the inescapable shadow of war.