Shadows of Your Childhood

A baby sleeps peacefully in his cradle. Suddenly, beautiful shadows begin to climb on the curtains of the darkened room while the outside world seems to be completely forgotten or gone. The baby wakes up and watches mesmerized how the shadows dance around him. He smiles and waves at them. Miraculously, the world comes to life once again. Mikhail Gorobchuk creates a universe as wonderful as the dawning of perception and language. The lesson of the great masters of Russian cinema comes forcefully back to life in his film. The light seems choreographed as if imagined by Alexandre Alexeieff and filmed with childish astonishment by Boris Kaufman. Gorobchuk recreates with piercing details the exact moment when the world present itself to the eyes and the imagination of a new-born. Everything begins to move while the human perception tries to understand the nature of what is going on. Shadows of Your Childhood is a truly astonishing film. A revelation of a major talent. A work of art that manages to capture all those flickering passages that kept us awake at night while dreaming of a life yet to come.

Giona A. Nazzaro