Mia Banko’s Amalka appears in almost every frame of Tiny Lights, usually in its centre.
It is a tall ask for such a young performer, but she rises to the challenge with aplomb delivering an impressively nuanced and authentic performance. Her Amalka is everything a six-year-old tends to be: charming, combative, fragile, frustrating, wide-eyed, intense, clingy, independent. Amalka is a character who has to cycle through these varying modes of childhood across a brief 76-minute running time and it is on the shoulders of this pre-adolescent actress that the success of Tiny Lights ultimately rests, as Beata Parkanova’s film competes for the top prize, the Crytal Globe, at this year’s Karlovy Vary International Film Festival.
The entire film is constructed to contemplate and replicate the experience of its protagonist, most notably in the case of the cinematography. Parkanova and her DoP, Tomas Juricek, shoot a lot of the film at the hip, literally, in bringing the camera down to Amalka’s eyeline. Unlike Laura Wandel’s similarly-shot Playground, Parkanova allows some flexibility in this – cutting away or widening the frame to provide space for the other characters in Amalka’s family to inhabit the screen. Where Wandel’s film used this technique to create a mounting intensity, Parkanova and Juricek’s visuals allow for the ebbs and flows of her drama, releasing tension when necessary. Still, the close-up focus on Amalka keeps her specific understanding of or reaction to events at the forefront of our mind.
Those events take place across the course of a single day in which Amalka’s parents reach a point of no return in their faltering marriage and Amalka comes to gain something like an understanding of what is transpiring. It begins when she comes down from her bedroom to find herself locked out of the living room while her mother (Elizveta Maximova), father (Marek Geisberg) and grandparents (Veronika Zilkova and Martin Finger) argue from the closed door. Amalka’s mother is evidently unhappy, and her own parents are dismayed at her selfishness given she has a young daughter. These recriminations continue as Amalka has breakfast with her parents, plays in the garden, goes swimming with her grandfather, watches her favourite tv show.
Seeing the drama from this unusual perspective means that the broader narrative is nearly always happening at or beyond the edge of the frame. With Amalka sat in the centre of the composition and just her mother’s hip and hand (holding Amalka’s) in frame, we hear her strained conversation with her parents as she drops Amalka off with them. While Amalka studiously collects together pinecones during a countryside walk, off-screen we hear her grandparents’ appraisal of their daughter’s actions. It is perhaps the perfect way to depict a disintegrating relationship, through the petty annoyances, passive aggression and unspoken recriminations.
Of course, though, the real crux of the drama is what is happening on screen as it is Amalka’s response to these stimuli that warrant the greatest attention. What makes this way of parsing this events, and Banko’s performance, so affecting are the tides of emotion and understanding. She is clearly a smart girl who understands the situation that is brewing asking pointed questions at the breakfast table that never address it directly but show her father she has a certain comprehension. As the day progresses her mood and needs change – she is comforted in the arms of her grandfather but rebellious and breaking the heads off the flowers of the neighbour’s garden. She acts out in certain moments and stays demurely quiet in others. It makes her as funny and sweet and infuriating as the whims of a six-year-old can be.
Inserted into this straightforward narrative drama are a handful of very brief inserts. They are presented as uncropped frames on a strip of celluloid, each is just a few seconds long, interrupting the verisimilitude. Quite how to interpret these inserts is left up to the viewer but one way is to see them as memories being formed by Amalka in the moment. Celluloid – particularly grainy 16mm or Super8 – is often used to imply the past or memories. Here, it feels like rather the suggesting a memory being recalled, they suggest one being created. One clip just shows Amalka’s mother in close up, tears in her eyes; another seems fascinated by the play of light from a crystal ornament on her grandmother’s mantelpiece. They seem to be fragments, the shapes and curious details – and snippets of unacknowledged emotion – that Amalka is committing to her memory. It adds a further layer of complexity to exactly how a young child is able to process what she is experiencing and they ways these events, while almost tangential to her day, will have a lasting impact.
Director, screenplay: Beata Parkanova
Cast: Mia Banko, Elizaveta Maximova, Veronika Zilkova, Martin Finger, Marek Geisberg
Producer: Vojtech Fric, Premysl Martinek, Martin Palan, Ondrej Kulhanek, Maros Hecko, Peter Veverka
Cinematography: Tomas Juricek
Editing: Alois Fisarek
Music: Michal Novinski
Sound: Viktor Krivosudsky
Production design: Petr Bakos
Production company: Love.FRAME, Bontonfilm Studios (both Czechia), Azyl Production (Slovakia)
Venue: Karlovy Vary International Film Festival (Crystal Globe Competition)
In Czech
75 minutes
Read more of the team’s coverage of KVIFF 2024.
