Le départ de Myna

I was there with Myna

In a city of the Spanish coast, Myna, a young illegal immigrant from an Eastern Europe country in the war, is looking after a child, Pablo, in the absence of his parents. A moment of inattention causes little Pablo a domestic accident and takes a blow in his head. Myna, alone at home, is afraid of being deported if she takes the child to the hospital and this leads her into a spiral of desperate measures on a night that will bring her down to the darkest forests of the human soul.

The camera will be our guide on this oppressive trip, sometimes claustrophobic, and so intense that at certain moments of the film we have the impression of living the situation in our own flesh. Actors are in state of grace and they give us such a natural acting that we sometimes doubt whether everything is happening for real, there, in front of us. Note that in the projections that were made several people felt unwell and left the theater.

Young Myna and her red hood represent the innocence of the most vulnerable in society in a film that envelops the viewer with a thick blanket of harsh, hurtful images and rough texture. We witness how the choices of the young girl break down along the way until the end, where a wolf in a white coat will offer his help... for a price.

The extremely long shots of the film illustrate the anxiety of the protagonist to find someone to help her and escape suspicion. As viewers we behold with concern the steps given by Myna; silences are long and introspective; off-camera shots reach a visceral tension ; all until a dramatic thirty-seven-minutes-sequence-shot when humanity is shown as it is: the hunter and the prey, the power of the strongest and the despair of a victim who can not see that she has already been hunted.