"It's like watching the genesis of a memory that will trouble poor Lea for many, many decades. It was raw, real and very unsettling"

When I'm not writing film reviews I work in therapy. I find it very rewarding. From time to time my clients open up and tell me some of their most traumatic childhood memories. Watching Everything Will Be Okay (Alles Wird Gut) feels very much like how it feels having one of those conversations.  It's like watching the genesis of a memory that will trouble poor Lea for many, many decades. It was raw, real and very unsettling.

In her debut film role, demonstrating some of the best child acting I've seen in years, Julia Pointer plays 8-year-old Lea. The film starts when her father Michael (Simon Schwarz) picks her up from her mother's house for some quality time. For a while the day progresses as you would expect. There's general chit chat about life and a trip to the toy shop where Lea's told she can pick anything she wants in a clear attempt to win favour, but still there's nothing overtly sinister. Lea's father's intentions are far more insidious than that and take a while to fully expose itself. Her phone goes missing, they visit the passport office and then he sells his car.

Everything Will Be Okay is told mostly from Lea's point of view and as each incident escalates, her sense of confusion, concern and eventually fear grows too. Whilst as adults we have a much clearer sense about what is going on, that doesn't make the film any more comfortable; if anything, much like watching a car driving towards a cliff edge, it just adds to the tension. As the permutations of Michael’s plan conspire against him, he becomes increasingly irascible. They are forced to stay in a hotel overnight and we observe Lea steal her father's phone and call home. As we watch her tap the numbers into the phone we can almost hear her mother once making Lea memorise the digits in case of emergencies. What follows is the most heart-wrenching portion of the film. It's simply shot, exposing the drama and the emotions, but not over-blowing them. The realism of that scene leaves its mark on you and leaves you wondering what comes next. There are no winners in a situation like this. The father's desperate, but is also far from being a heinous character. If anything his desperation is just as heart-wrenching as Lea's. Everyone appears to be doing their best to manage a terrible situation and the panacean promise that everything will be okay is in the end nothing more than palliative care.

Everything Will Be Okay (Alles Wird Gut) is up for an Oscar for Best Short Film (Live Action).  It has already won many accolades, including the Audience Award at the Milan Film Festival, the Alberto Sanchez Special Award at the Huesca International Film Festival, Best Medium Length Film at the Max Ophüls Film Festival in Germany, and the Best Fiction Short at the New Films Festival in Portugal, to name but a few.