Zlata is an ordinary child, nothing out of the ordinary, who goes to the museum with her family. She stops in front of a painting of a dark-haired young girl who looks like her, stretched out on a Persian rug and playing with her cat. All of this would seem banal, if not for the fact that Zlata is a Ukrainian refugee exiled in Belgium. Her own cat, Findus, stayed behind with her father in their half-abandoned home. The film is punctuated by the presence (both visible and evoked) and the purring of Findus, whom Mattias Bavré brings back again and again, like an echo embodying everything she had to leave behind, everything she misses, everything now so far away from her. This cat is the film’s central motif, Zlata’s obsession: she thinks of him (perhaps to think less about the rest), draws him, sculpts him in modeling clay, dreams of him. Even when her long-awaited father finally joins them, it is the longing for a cat that prevails.

Between school, chores, errands, Zlata clings to her memories and, despite being only 12 and already shaken by events that no child — no human being — should have to live through, she remains detached from the war afflicting her country. The force of her unfathomable desire to return home prevents her… from understanding? from accepting? from imagining? the horror of the bombs still raining down on her homeland, which her mother and grandmother must constantly remind her of. “It’s dangerous. It’s arbitrary. It’s real. It’s endless.” What remains for her then is boredom, pierced by small daily joys, which the filmmaker captures with infinite restraint and tenderness, in the intimacy of faces and gestures that speak more than any words.

Claire Valade
Critic and programmer