Low Tide

A twelve year old boy and his single mother live in the same house and lead separate lives. She works and then goes out with her friends; he spends his days alone. That solitude is freedom on one side and abandonment on the other. What the boy finds on his own gradually opens up the distance between the rules of society and the laws of nature. Then events he did not see coming break the fragile balance of his inner world. Roberto Minervini does not try to explain any of it and does not name a culprit; he looks at what neglect looks like inside a child's day. The mother is not drawn as a bad person either, only as someone who is not there.