Chain-smoking her cares away while performing spoken-word poetry haunted by dark imagery of spiders and scars, Vesna will no more confront the reality of her pregnancy than Moja will face the loss of their mother. Older, though still young, sister Vesna (Mackenzie Mazur) is pregnant – hence Moja’s quest for baby clothes – and in freefall.
While it’s painful to witness these quiet collapses, Moja is handling things far better than those around her who should rightfully be guiding her through this unspeakable moment.
When pushed to do so, she sinks into a sort of fugue state that can only be managed by repeating out loud the sort of disaster response instructions you’d learn if you were the fire warden in an office building. Moja (magnificently expressive newcomer Loti Kovacic) is almost single-handedly trying to keep her family together in the wake of the unseen death of her mother, a tragedy she chooses not to acknowledge. But in Slovenian-Australian filmmaker Sara Kern’s beautifully realised feature debut Moja Vesna, this moment, alongside many others, will rip out your heart and dance on the sorry fragments.Įxpanding on the writer/director’s award-winning short Vesna Goodbye, this Melbourne-set melancholia unfurls in the outer suburbs. In any other situation, the absurdity of a ten-year-old standing in the school playground haggling over the phone to secure baby items from a perplexed Gumtree contact, unseen and unconvinced at the other end of the line, would play as broad comedy.
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