War

“Being unintelligent and armed makes someone into a terribly dangerous person”. That is just one of the mature observations that emanate from a young boy who is fleeing through his derelict village desperate to fetch his younger sister whom he has locked in a chimney for her own safety. He knows that his mother was taken by the soldiers and brutalised; he fears that if he is caught then he will be killed and that his sister will either face a similar fate or be left alone to starve to death. We are told all this by a narration from the lad (Pau Poch) whose use of language is both empathetic and complex. He describes his predicaments with almost scientific detail while all we see is him running and all we hear is his voice and the echoes of him running - and it's really quite an affecting eight minutes of menacing cinema that by no means finishes what it starts. Is it worse just to be terrified or to realise that you are and to understand why?