To Be Eighteen (The War)

A Ukrainian protagonist and a Quebec filmmaker look each other in the eye. This static, head-on camera lets us slip in between them. Lisa is looking at us, but I like to think she isn't speaking to us. Only to Romane. While each of them recognizes herself, at least in part, in what the other is going through — exile, uprooting, the passage into adulthood — the film brilliantly brings out the way their memories intertwine, as though there were no point in untangling which belong to whom. The words are Lisa's, undoubtedly, but the images that mirror them aren't hers alone. There is a lot of space in these images. Enough for two. Elusive and floating, they call out to be embodied by whoever is watching. They explore deliberately anonymous urban landscapes. They exert no hold over what they document; instead, they are curious, distant, yet attentive. As if the image itself were saying: "We are not from here, but that doesn't make us strangers."

Jason Todd
Programmer and filmmaker