Nakam

They’re a background detail in a lot of World War Two films: resistance fighters. They’re characterised as brave, heroic even, but we rarely see what they do. When we see them, they’re mostly young men, the occasional young woman. It would be distracting – and distinctly uncomfortable – to see them as they really were. Their acts of violence distinguishable from terrorism only by the context, by the act that that their targets were seen as criminal by most of the world. And the fact that, amongst their number, there were children.

Motele Schlein was a Belorussian boy who distinguished himself with one particular act early on in his career as a resistance fighter, and that incident provided the inspiration for this Oscar-shortlisted short film by Andreas Kessler. The film stars Anton Krymskiy as Mitka, a 12-year-old violin prodigy and the sole survivor of a Nazi attack which killed his family. Using his instrument to make a living, he has found a place in a bar and restaurant, and a friend in pianist Yegor (Yevgeni Sitokhin). He faces a dilemma when SS officers plan a meeting there and local partisans ask him to blow it up and kill them. Not only has he never killed anyone before – for all that he longs to take revenge – but there’s a risk that Yegor could be killed in the attack too.

It’s a lot for a kid that age to carry. Krymskiy is excellent, not least because he also carries off the violin playing after just 12 weeks of lessons. The scenes in which Mitka meets with his partisan mentor achieve a careful ambiguity. To what extent is the boy really capable of making his own decision about so grave a matter? Does the urgency of preventing Nazi atrocities justify putting that kind of pressure on a child?

Though the film is little more than half an hour long, that’s long enough for us to meet one of the Nazis, Officer Seeger (Peter Miklusz), who, not realising that the boy is Jewish, initially takes a shine to him. His friendly behaviour is a reminder that monsters aren’t always obvious; later we will overhear a conversation about exactly what he and his colleagues plan to do. To an extent, this will reduce the moral difficulty facing Mitka, but Seeger’s interest strengthens the thriller element of the film, as the boy smuggles explosives into the bar in his violin case, hoping against hope that the officer – who loves his playing – won’t ask him to open it.

Part of a new wave of films which look beyond the narrative of Jewish people as passive victims in Nazi-occupied countries, exploring efforts to fight back or get revenge (‘nakam’ in Hebrew) and perhaps thereby making it easier for modern viewers to relate to them, this neatly crafted short has a melancholy character. Leonard Caspari’s cinematography finds beauty in the soft browns, greys and creams of village buildings and period attire, but the shadow of what is to come – one way or another – hangs over everything. In war one must accept that there will be casualties, but Kessler finds another tragedy in the loss of innocence.