12-yr-old Lika loses the closest people in her life – her grandmother and grandfather. Trying to cope with her grief, she starts playing a semi-fictional game in which she involves other people too.
I was astounded by “Youth” even when I was shown it handwritten and in screenplay format by the young director who’d just made the profound war drama “Franz+Polina”. I was all the more pleased to reread it as a novella and discover the literary talent in this film director, whose profession it is to tell stories in visual images. It is very rare to find a combination of these qualities in one person.
Pavel Lungin, film director