This website uses cookies so that we can provide you with the best user experience possible. Cookie information is stored in your browser and performs functions such as recognising you when you return to our website and helping our team to understand which sections of the website you find most interesting and useful.
Privacy Overview
Strictly Necessary Cookies
Strictly Necessary Cookie should be enabled at all times so that we can save your preferences for cookie settings.
If you disable this cookie, we will not be able to save your preferences. This means that every time you visit this website you will need to enable or disable cookies again.
3rd Party Cookies
This website uses Google Analytics to collect anonymous information such as the number of visitors to the site, and the most popular pages.
Keeping this cookie enabled helps us to improve our website.
Please enable Strictly Necessary Cookies first so that we can save your preferences!
Director's Statement
A little Jewish girl and the Second World War.
One and only hero.
Cinematic space is limited to the insides of a fireplace, and the geography of events is limited to the classroom of a village school that had been turned into a Nazi commandant’s office. Inside the fireplace the girl finds a safe place where she makes a nest for herself. A home. Outside is an insane world of adults. We see it’s reflection in a bubbly amalgam on the old mirror.
This is the story of survival and victory.
Robinson Crusoe had it easier: he was an adult, he wasn’t alone, and he had a whole island for himself. Anna is six years old, no one is there to help her, and there is only a small chance of finding food at the commandant’s office. Thirst and hunger are a constant in Anna’s life. There are no flashbacks in the film because the past is dead. There is no future. There is only the present. Only what happens now is significant.
The film isn’t black and white. Anna is a child and so there are many bright colours around her. The walls of the old school are blue and green. In the classroom there is a lot of red. On set there are many authentic Soviet school objects from the 30s and 40s.
The soundscape of the film is diverse, there are dialogues from the Commandant’s office workers: Germans, Ukrainians, Russians. Also present are voices of soldiers: Germans, Frenchmen, Hungarians, Romanians. The German radio plays the propaganda programs and music. Neither the viewer nor Anna can understand it all but it makes no difference. What matters is located inside the fireplace, in the world of Anna. Her beautiful world is reaching further and further and soon it will encompass the entire planet Earth – and Anna will win the World War.