Venice 2025: Short Summer (dir. Nastia Korkia) | Review
Short Summer depicts the Russian childhood during wartime from a naturalistic lens, evoking the memories and small details that shape us.
Nastia Korkia’s loosely inspired autobiographical film during the 2nd Chechen war is a contained look from a child’s perspective in the Russian countryside. Korkia replaces the typical war movie trappings of battle and destruction with lyricism and the forgotten – the children of war. With the rise of Russia’s fascist rule in the past decade, rising young Russian filmmakers such as Kantemir Balagov, Ruslan Fedotov, Vadim Kostrov, and Nastia Korkia have been making both short and feature films that show a unique perspective who grew in and out of their home country. Presenting in the Giornate delgli Autori at this year’s Venice Film Festival, Korkia’s first feature film, Short Summer, is a personal and confident debut that subtly unveils the cascading effects of war from a child’s point of view.
Opening in a car ride from the city to the countryside, Katya (Maiia Pleshkevich), a young girl, is going to her grandparents’ rural summer home. A light gleams across the side of the road, presumably sourced by a mirror held by Katya bouncing the sun to reflect its light onto the world. An innocent and playful activity where the motif of light repeats throughout the film. Korkia’s economic screenplay is concise in both words and images. For one, little information is provided regarding Katya’s parents, alluding to the fact of war, in which also the grandparents have begun the process of their divorce. The images show the adults’ slow decay due to the country’s instability and lack of care, while the children wander with idyllic imagination.
The film immediately distills its formal construction through its rigorous mise-en-scene and its fixed camera placement. Employing mostly panoramic compositions with interspersed close-ups of the subjects, the stationary camera allows a freedom of character movement and landscape images as a compartmentalization of emotion. Korkia’s observation of Katya and the world around her is the heart of the film, whether it is her and other children playing amongst nature or finding remnants of the past, juxtaposed with the dread slowly permeating in the background. This formal approach presents a well-balance interplay between the exterior/interior of the inhabitants and landscape.
For a film that hides behind the war, and only mentions of it through radio or television audio, it doesn’t make a direct proclamation of its stance, but rather, the subsidiaries of the war. Korkia inserts elusive side-plots that come off almost absurd – a man suffering from PTSD wanted for violence or Katya wandering down a well discovering a couple fucking amidst the darkness. These fragmented memories show the trivial and strange events that we all hold on to. As we see and hear more of Katya’s surroundings, we see how the small details and memory shapes a child’s growth and trauma.
The film has a deep sense of ownership, presumably picking details from Korkia’s childhood. With a inquisitive and quiet, yet strong performance by Maiia, her stoic expressions mixed with the childish nature to live is one of the strongest factors for such a patient, ponderous film. Trading the stereotypical combat of war for naturalism, Korkia evokes the formative and psychological impacts a season can have on oneself, striving to illuminate the surroundings amidst the dark times.
Our team is on the ground in Italy to cover the 82nd Venice International Film Festival, running from 27 August to 6 September 2025.
