War

Everyone around fifteen year old Matteo is against him; he has no friends and his parents seem to live in another world. The pressure grows as his awkward attempts to win his father’s respect keep failing. One night two men take him away: his parents have sent him to a remote alpine pasture, where he is to spend the summer at hard work on a family farm. When he arrives a surprise is waiting for him. The film does not present the boy’s not fitting the mould set for boys as a fault; it shows what his family and the people around him want from him. The account does not normalise a child being carried off without his consent. Benjamin Lutzke plays the lead in Simon Jaquemet’s hundred and six minute Swiss film, completed in 2014.