‘Short Summer’ Venice Review: Childhood Games in the Shadow of War

Contemplation seems to be Katya’s favorite pastime. At just eight years old, she spends her summers with her grandparents in a remote, unremarkable corner of the Russian countryside near the Caucasus, a place where time feels suspended and distractions are scarce. Her games are modest, born of boredom and imagination: holding up a piece of glass to catch the sunlight and scatter its reflections across different surfaces, or tossing stones into a mysterious underground shaft and listening intently as they clatter into the unseen depths. These small rituals, at once playful and oddly meditative, define her days. They also echo the spirit of SHORT SUMMER, a film that, like Katya, lingers on surfaces, gestures, and fleeting impressions rather than conventional narrative.

Beneath this sense of stillness, however, lies another world. The specter of war hangs quietly but unmistakably over the film, even when the girl herself barely perceives it. Two boys in the village stop Katya and her grandparents on the road, demanding to see their documents, as if performing a militarized checkpoint routine. The detail feels like a child’s game—yet also like an omen. The precise period is left vague, but fragments of news heard in the background, including mention of the 2004 school hostage crisis in Beslan, tie the story to the ongoing Chechen conflict. For the adults, these are grim reminders; for Katya, they pass almost unnoticed.

Her immediate world is smaller, but no less fraught. The central drama, as far as she can grasp it, is that her grandparents no longer get along. Their disagreements simmer just beneath the surface, too subtle for her to fully decode yet too loud to ignore. The adult world seems weighed down by fractures: in one government office, the bureaucratic machinery that processes divorces also issues death certificates for soldiers killed in the fighting. Personal and collective tragedies blend together in the same gray corridors.

Nastia Korkia is less interested in plot mechanics than in perception—the way the world looks, sounds, and feels when filtered through the consciousness of a child. The camera lingers on details, drawing out a sense of mystery in mundane activities. This positions SHORT SUMMER within a wave of contemporary cinema, often led by women directors, that revisits childhood as a territory of half-understood memories: where small gestures, overheard conversations, or unexplained silences become markers of deeper, often unarticulated conflicts. Like films that straddle memoir and impressionism, it shows how children register fractures in family or society without fully grasping their meaning.

Visually and tonally, the film drifts between warmth and unease. The dacha, the summer fields, and the rituals of everyday life are presented with intimacy and affection. Yet shadows intrude: the constant presence of that bottomless pit into which stones are thrown; the tension between the grandparents; the faint but persistent hum of war. Korkia’s style can veer toward the mannered, with recurring symbols and metaphors that underline themes a little too insistently. Still, the film’s melancholy core outweighs these excesses.

By its conclusion, SHORT SUMMER has grown heavier, darker, than one might expect. What seemed at first a portrait of idle, sunlit days becomes something closer to tragedy, edging toward a space between magical realism and historical reckoning. For Katya, it was only one summer, brief like the title suggests. And for the viewer, the film lingers in much the same way: a fragile recollection of innocence haunted by history, a meditation on how childhood can carry the weight of a world in turmoil without ever quite knowing it.