Summer with and without Grandpa / Лето с дедушкой и без

D60b5fe8452421fcbefbdc791a7bb923a8458ef6

2018 | Fiction | 26 min. | Russia | 6+

A 7-year-old girl doesn’t want to know what death is; she learns what kissing is instead. But it is impossible to replace a grandpa who passed away with any kind of kissing.

Directors Statement

Do you know, how to run away from home to a wasteland? Have you ever done a fire out of tea leafs? Do you remember your first erotic dream and how it was to wake up?  The iambic pentameter has the most intensity possible in spoken word. But life itself is more complicated, than speech. It keeps quite, it breathes, and watches. In my film we are to be a small girl and our grandpa would die.  Our mom wants to squeeze us into a strict black dress, into the funeral flow of things, into the common sense. But is it possible to place a small girl into something that predictable? You could place her into a handful of thistledown, or into a bubble of a gum. We are a small girl and killer instinct, baby tenderness, and freedom of the wind still lives in us. We are a shell that still hears the ocean inside of it. It is impossible to squeeze us into a tight black dress, as we want to love. And to kiss, as if we were charmed. And then, only then, we’ll remember him, our grandpa. But he won’t be a body in a costume. He will be a warmth of the fire. He will be a special way to eat candy.  We will run across the thorny field and cry, as death doesn’t protect from love. And we all find it out so early, much earlier, than the grown-ups think.  The iambic pentameter has the most intensity possible in spoken word. But we won’t talk of it in iambic pentameters, even when we would feel as intense. We would keep quite, breath and watch. We would cause troubles. And this is our way of talking in our own iambic pentameter. With my film I hope to hear the uneven breath of a small girl.

Director: Katya Zayaz

Producer: Elena Zamkova

Сast: Veronika Zaytseva, Sergey Veselov, Roman Timchuck , Varvara Brekhunova, Emilia Abdulaeva and Tatiana Burnakina

Studio: Ametist Production Company