Summer 1993
[Estiu 1993], directed by Carla Simón, Spain 2017, 97' (English friendly)
The summer of 1993 is a time of difficult changes. Six-year-old Frida has to go live with her uncle and his family in the Spanish provinces-and this is not just a holiday trip. She has lost both her parents-her mother having died recently following a long illness-and she has to learn to live with new guardians. Carli Simón's first full-length feature film is based partly on her own childhood experiences. Avoiding sentimentalism, the Catalan director paints a complex emotional portrait of a child who is confronted with a wave of contradictory feelings: anger, jealousy, and a growing sense of attachment. With sensibility, she shows the process of experiencing loss, concentrating not on dramatic events, but rather on observations of the seemingly mundane aspects of everyday life. She is helped in this by the charismatic and mature Laia Artigas in the main role. This moving film about the bitter taste of childhood in the shadow of the AIDS epidemic has been warmly received at festivals all around the world. In Berlin, it took home the award for the best debut.
