A girl is crying, carving scratches into the wood with a Swiss army knife – exactly as if they were flesh wounds. On top of that, she cuts off her hair. But she is not alone with her sadness: A tender “Nisse” (a household spirit) watches her. When she seems to vanish in the thicket of her dark thoughts, he drops a small injured bird in her way so that both can learn to fly. “Mother Didn’t Know” is a magical and dark tale of childhood depression and of the importance to recognise it and react without delay. The girl’s emotions are given ample space; the camera is close to her and her demons. All around, delicate dust motes float in the air like fairy dust. Killi’s film, though, could also be a tale about the burden of growing up, a burden that becomes unrelatable in retrospect. In any case, there are windows, exits, light – if you only look closely enough.

Marie Ketzscher

Dramas that many children have to endure play out in silence and hiding: The girl cuddling her dog because her own mother is staggering about with a glass of red wine, probably pregnant again. The boy as a toy ball caught between his aggressive parents who rain their arguments down on him with hacking beaks. Another girl who balances a dangerously wobbling seesaw with her family members on it. With her intimate cut-out animation, Marianne Bundgaard Nielsen metaphorically leafs through the family albums and shows the stories hidden by the staged photos. The adults are dreary puppets, sometimes fading drawings, addressing suicides within the family. The children, on the other hand, are much more lively figures with big accusing eyes, small read hearts and sometimes even coloured butterfly wings. You have to let them flutter and fly instead of unloading so much of your own misery on them.

Marie Ketzscher