Ulja and Milk Teeth: Two Gems of the Palic Festival

There is a moment in the Latvian film Ulja when the camera watches a tall, awkward girl as if it does not quite know where to place her in the frame, and in that very discomfort, a film unsure how to contain its own heroine, lies everything Palic is trying to tell us this year about growing up. The 33rd European Film Festival opened on July 18 with its traditional Aleksandar Lifka Award, but the real temperature of this edition is set not by the opening ceremony but by two quiet, stubborn films from the Parallels and Collisions selection.

Latvia’s Ulja, directed by Viesturs Kairiss, and Romania’s Milk Teeth by Mihai Mincan at first glance have little in common. One is a black-and-white biography of a Soviet basketball legend, the other a dark fairy tale about a child’s disappearance at the dawn of a collapsing regime. And yet both films look at the world through the eyes of a girl on the verge of becoming a woman, and both refuse to tell that coming of age as a neat, rounded story.

How do you grow up in a body that does not fit?

Ulja is devoted to the youth of Uljana Semjonova, a basketball player whose height was both a gift and a sentence. Kairiss makes a bold, almost provocative choice: he hands the lead role to male theatre actor Karlis Arnolds Avots, not to shock but to push that unusual, monumental presence through a filter of femininity and to show how thin the line is between admiration and estrangement. The black-and-white cinematography of Poland’s Wojciech Staron turns the Latvian village and Soviet gymnasiums into a space where the body is felt as a burden rather than a strength.

This is not a film about victories and medals, though it easily could have been. Kairiss is far more interested in how one belongs to a world that celebrates and marginalizes you at the same time, in how identity is built when your surroundings see you first as an anomaly and only then as a person. In that light, the world premiere at Cannes, in the Un Certain Regard program, feels logical: this is a film that asks for a viewer willing to sit in discomfort rather than cheer.

A fairy tale before the fall

Milk Teeth takes us to Romania in 1989, into the final months of the Ceausescu regime, where a ten-year-old girl tries to make sense of her sister’s mysterious disappearance. Mincan blends the recognizable realism of the Romanian new wave with scenes of magical realism and mysticism, so that the investigation the children conduct on their own begins to erase the border between reality and imagination. The collapse of the family mirrors the collapse of an entire society, and the child’s gaze becomes the only honest witness to the breakdown.

What connects Milk Teeth, premiered in Venice, with Ulja is not the theme of growing up in itself but the refusal to prettify it. Both heroines learn that the world is unjust long before they have the words for it, and both carry that knowledge in the body rather than in sentences. By choosing these two films for the same selection, Palic has written an editorial sentence clearer than any ceremony: growing up is a political act, and the period drama is the best way to admit it.

It is telling that both films come from small European cinemas that rarely reach our theatres, so Palic this summer has again been what it does best, a place where voices we would otherwise never hear can finally reach us. And you, when you choose a film about growing up, do you prefer the version that translates sorrow into tenderness, or this one from Palic, which refuses to offer us any comfort?