OSIEMNASTKA

With her opening shot inside a youth detention centre, Marta Prus immediately doubles the challenges of reaching adulthood: as Gosia’s eighteenth birthday approaches, the teenager is also preparing her return to the outside world, which we suspect may be complicated. The filmmaker films this “Rosetta” of Łodż uncompromisingly, showing the young girl’s disquieting jubilation at her brother’s selfharming games or her aggressive coldness when she returns to live in her mother’s flat. Although never spelt out, relationships and situations materialise in the duration of shots: the excitement of an upcoming birthday party away from the centre is assailed on all sides, flattened by the lack of money and the legal risk that Gosia’s brother will take by being present. Symbolically strong and nourished by Gosia’s very concrete hopes (getting back the money her mother had frozen on a bank account), this coming of age is reduced to rags in twenty minutes. Her simplest but also most glittering attire: a sequined outfit, music and rays of light dancing in the half-light. (Charlotte Garson)