Saint Clara

The year is 1999. Clara is thirteen, she can see the future and move objects, and the film is built from several stories circling around her. A boy in her class who is taken with her, the state of two families, and a headmaster who will not stop speaking French all sit in the same picture. Ari Folman and Ori Sivan directed it together in 1996, adapting a novel by the Czech writer Pavel Kohout. The attitude that would mark Folman's later work is already here: no effort at all to separate the real from the fantastic. Setting it in 1999 is not incidental either; an end of century unease moves through the whole thing.