In Autumn, Thinking about Summer and Childhood

Where does our cinematic obsession with summer and childhood come from? What is it about those glowing months, and what are we really seeking when we look back at childhood? Turning inward and backward is so often a source of inspiration and reflection, for filmmakers and filmgoers alike. As the future feels increasingly uncertain and unforeseen, perhaps now more than ever, the past, our memories, and the inner child within us rise to the surface. They ask what has happened to us, and offer a mirror to what is happening around us.

At this year’s Viennale, three films — Memory, Strange River (Estrany riu), and Short Summer (Korotkoe leto)— each offer distinct ways of revisiting the past, revealing how cinema, with its transformative power, enables us to reimagine our private histories, share these experiences, and carry them forward.

Vladlena Sandu’s Memory pieces together fragments of her childhood, using a rich collage of media to recreate and re-curate moments that linger in her mind. The girl who plays her younger self arranges a dollhouse in which everyone from her life is represented by a small figurine. This autobiographical film becomes a mosaic of recollections — some tender, others brutal — loosely associated, connected, juxtaposed, and then reexamined.

It is not only a personal memory but a collective one, a shared historical moment marking the end of the Soviet Union and the first war between Chechnya and Russia. It is a deeply personal reflection on what it means to stand in the middle of history without being part of its decision-making — how the larger context seeps into daily life, how individuals, both villains and innocents, are swept along by its current, and how children, always sharp observers of the world, perceive the texture of time without yet understanding it.

Nastia Korkia’s Short Summer captures a single summer in the countryside near the same area. Eight-year-old Katya spends the season with her grandparents in a rural area under the shadow of the Chechen War — though it is never clear which one. Against a backdrop of violence, village boys play at being officers at checkpoints, verifying documents and holding toy guns that look disturbingly real, while an unnaturally tall killer roams free. Meanwhile, Katya’s grandfather, embroiled in an affair, files for divorce from her grandmother.

Yet all these events, though near, feel distant in the haze of a childhood summer — a time filled instead with running through grass with friends, basking in sunlight, playing hide and seek, and watching insects zigzag by. In this innocent way of inhabiting the season, even moments of extreme tension seem to dissolve, and all creatures appear equally interesting, equally benign.

At the film’s end, Katya plays with a mirror, reflecting light to stage a private light-and-shadow performance in her city bedroom. When the camera drifts away to the living room and returns, she has vanished — only the light remains. Summer, like childhood, seems as fleeting as the flickering rays of light glancing off a mirror.

In Jaume Claret Muxart’s Strange River, summer and youth become a time of both sexual and spatial discovery. Shot with sensual intimacy, the film follows sixteen-year-old Dídac during a family cycling holiday along the Danube in southern Germany. The five travel together: parents locked in constant quarrels, two younger brothers — one old enough to fight but too young to understand, the other still adorably distant from adolescence — and Dídac himself.

The mother repeatedly rehearses lines from Friedrich Hölderlin’s Der Tod des Empedokles, as if waiting for a moment of being truly heard; the father passionately recounts stories about the Ulm School of Design, yet no one wants to listen. Around a quiet residential street at night, dimly lit by streetlamps, and in the glaring daylight under a burning sun, Dídac encounters a boy who once emerged from the water — a boy who keeps reappearing, insistently and mysteriously, in nearby and faraway places. Is he real? This spectral figure could be a dream, a ghost, a fairy, or simply a stalker. Whatever he is, he becomes Dídac’s guide — through the river, through sensual awakening, and as a refuge from the turmoil of his imperfect family.

Here, once again, summer glows bright in orange light — in the heat of a tent, in the intensity of a gaze. It is probably their last family holiday together, and perhaps Dídac’s last summer before he fully discovers his homosexuality — the bittersweet season of first heartbreaks and aching desire. Shot on 16mm, it is a summer where hormones begin to find their way into both heart and mind; a summer when we can no longer tell whether our restlessness comes from sweating in the heat or from sweating with longing.

by Yun-hua Chen

© FIPRESCI 2025