Worth: $19.00
FilmInk rates movies out of $20 — the score indicates the amount we believe a ticket to the movie to be worth
Cast:
Loti Kovacic, Mackenzie Mazur, Claudia Karvan, Gregor Bakovic, Flora Feldman
Intro:
... one of the best Australian features in recent memory.
Slovenian-Australian director Sara Kern has made an exquisite debut feature in her family drama Moja Vesna.
Delicate and devastating, the film follows ten-year-old Moja (Loti Kovacic) as she desperately tries to keep her fracturing family together after the recent death of her mother – something she cannot accept.
Moja tries to control her emotional turmoil by focusing her efforts on caring for her heavily pregnant sister, Vesna (Mackenzie Mazur), who is equally unwilling to accept her own pregnancy (a hint as to why, comes from one of Vesna’s pieces of slam poetry). Mute with inadequacy, their father Milos (Gregor Bakovic) is wrestling with his own grief and cannot connect with the truculent Vesna nor convince Moja that she has to acknowledge that her mother is no longer around.
Moja, Vesna, and Milos live in an unrenovated rental in one of Melbourne’s outer suburbs. The house is small and made smaller still by the family avoiding the mother’s bedroom. Milos sleeps on the couch, Vesna and Moja share a room and a bunk bed. Only Moja is trying to keep her mother alive by setting a place for her at the family table every night. Vesna is trying to force Moja to face the reality of their mother’s death and she’s also trying to untangle exactly how their mother died. A single car accident that was probably suicide, but Milos refuses to talk about the emotional state of his wife.
Conversely, Vesna is trying to speak about her own emotional state, except she’s writing it through poetry and attempting to use metaphors to explain what she is feeling to Moja; a child for whom the adult world is weighing heavily. When Moja takes it on herself to try to organise baby supplies for Vesna (something Milos should be doing but perhaps linguistic barriers prevent him), she meets the kindly Miranda (Claudia Karvan) and her free-spirited daughter, Danger (Flora Feldman). In Mirada and Danger, Moja sees what it is like to be just a kid with a mother, doing kid stuff without the burden of caring for others.
Sara Kern is concerned with the immigrant experience and the feeling of being on the outside. Milos works in a kitchen, and he is detached from any form of community. He speaks Slovenian with Moja, but Vesna refuses to interact with him in the language. When Miranda, in a somewhat tone-deaf manner, asks Milos if he misses home, his response is that he is home – yet what is that home with his family in such a state of distress?
With Milos mostly in the background, the story centres itself on the relationship between the two sisters. Vesna is suffering extreme depression and a listlessness that comes from carrying guilt about her mother’s death (“She used to talk to me about her feelings” she tells Moja).
Vesna also just wants to be a young person, which is something that she fails to notice is also one of Moja’s desires. She leans on Moja but also deliberately places a barrier between them. The more Moja tries to nurture Vesna and the child she is carrying, the more distant Vesna becomes. Vesna is on her own journey of possible obliteration and there’s nothing Moja can do to stop her.
Kern’s film, which stems from her own experiences as an immigrant in Australia, is rich with symbolism that reveals emotional truths. When the voice of the actors cannot speak, she allows the camera to. There are indelible moments where the smallest gestures tell the story: Moja trying to stroke her sister’s hair through a car window, the burning of a precious piece of furniture, a sister bringing her sister’s hand to hold her. Kern’s visual mastery is astounding. The director captures the meaning of silence and absence with an enigmatic skill and cinematographer Lev Predon Kowarski realises Kern’s vision with impeccable work.
In a year that has provided audiences with exceptional breakout roles for child actors, such as Frankie Corio in Charlotte Wells’ Aftersun and Catherine Clinch in Colm Bairead’s The Quiet Girl, Loti Kovacic as Moja is equally revelatory. Loti had never acted professionally before being cast in Moja Vesna, yet her screen presence is striking and haunting in its honesty. Moja’s sad and searching eyes, her timid presence, her desire for her own childhood, and her fragile strength are all conveyed with such purpose by Loti Kovacic. In stories told through a child’s eye, it is essential that the child acting as the cinematic vessel is someone who the audience wants to spend time with. Loti Kovacic is an actor whose spellbinding natural talent brings the audience in on an intimate level to the film.
Mackenzie Mazur is a more mercurial presence as Vesna. We feel the danger she places herself in and the disregard she has for her safety, yet it is her storytelling that brings us closer to her as a character. Mazur wrote much of Vesna’s poetry. Vesna’s mental state is given literal voice in those verses. Where she cannot express herself to Milos, nor Moja – who for all her maturity, is still a child – the poetry is where her truth lies.
Sara Kern has made one of the best Australian features in recent memory, and certainly her debut is more than equal to Goran Stolevski’s magnetic You Won’t Be Alone. Moja Vesna (which in Slovenian translates to ‘moja’ being me, and Vesna being the goddess of spring and renewal, hence ‘My Vesna,’ or possibly ‘My Renewal’) is melancholy and difficult, but ends on a note of hope, and yes, renewal for Moja.
Moja is told by Vesna to “Hold tight, and feel it, feel it all,” and Kern is conferring the same message to the audience. Moja Vesna will make you feel it all, and you will be all the richer for doing so.
