The Slovak children's film Little Haven, which won the Crystal Bear Award in the New Generation Unit of the 67th Berlin Film Festival, is based on Monika Kompaníková's novel The Fifth Ship, which tells the story of 10-year-old Jaka, who adopted a pair of twins abandoned on the streets of Bratislava with her playmates after being abandoned by her mother Lucia.
The first part of "Little Harbor" explores the relationship between three generations (grandmother, mother and daughter) in a rather didactic way, while in the second part, the director pushes the film to the limits of fantasy, bringing us an incredible story of a family, two children living together, both a helpless way to seek love and an effective way to escape from this world and create a new world.
The director uses the innocence of a child to depict the depravity of the adult world, and the film constantly shows children being abandoned, including Yaka, the twins, and Jaca's neighbor Christian, especially the latter, which is both unexpected, but not so heavy.
The film's writer and director, Iveta Grofova, combines multiple genres to create a bizarre viewing experience: a documentary-style rough portrayal of the social conditions of The lower middle class in which Yaka lived, in contrast to the stereotypical world represented by the Christian family; There is also a pronounced mv aesthetic, with actress Katarína Kamencová, the actress who plays the fallen mother, a singer of slovakia's voice; There's also a bit of an adventurous movie, and the reunion ending that caters to our expectations is an obvious tribute to Wes Anderson and his work Moonrise Kingdom.
Finally, when the film ends in unexpected ways, many of the narrative threads are shelved, and the overly fairytale clichéd plot contrasts with the realism of violent and abusive imagery. The clear division between good and evil, between adults and children, between the old and the new, lacks the necessary processing, fails to reach a credible level, and has the appearance of allegory without substantive follow-up.
Despite the director's good intentions, in the end, "Little Harbor" was not very satisfactory: just like the young protagonist Jaca is too young to take care of the twins, the film itself is too childish, and the treatment of the subject matter and characters is not mature enough to grasp the universal language that the medium of film should adopt.