Although she’s still a teenager, the weight of responsibility already weighs heavily on Ola—as the “manager” of her dysfunctional family, who live together in the most cramped of conditions. She warns her father to stay off the drink, helps her autistic brother learn religious vocabulary for the exam before his First Communion and maintains contact with her absent mother via telephone, hoping she will return. She counters the instability of the situation with an unbridled will to keep the family together. In her intense feature debut KOMUNIA (Communion, Poland 2016), Polish filmmaker Anna Zamecka (*1982) watches the everyday lives of two adolescents left to their own devices from right up close. The four children in Hirokazu Kore-eda’s calm chamber drama DARE MO SHIRANAI (Nobody Knows, Japan 2004) must also fend for themselves, which is being shown afterwards as a director’s choice. Abandoned by their mother, they must organize their survival together and attempt to retain some degree of normality in this exceptional situation.(bik) (11.1.)
