THE LAST DAY OF SUMMER

Inspired by his own childhood recollections, filmmaker Piotr Stasik portrays several pupils attending a cadet school in the Russian provincial city of Penza. His film observes the day-to-day life, inside and outside school hours, of pupils in an institution that drills discipline, obedience and patriotism into four hundred adolescents between the ages of seven and seventeen. The neatly uniformed pupils we see receiving lessons in Russian military history and the horrors of war from stern-looking women and ageing generals look like miniature adults; outside the classroom they turn into normal children and adolescents with typical hobbies, wishes and dreams. Seven-year-old Artiom keeps a critical eye on his fellow pupils in his function of class commander; in his spare time he collects model cars or discusses his dreams with a friend. The eleven-year-old romanticist Kiril has fallen in love with a girl of the same age, but is too shy to confess his feelings. At sixteen, Maksim is due to graduate shortly; after all the school has taught him about certain aspects of adulthood, he has mixed feelings about the future. “When I was small I wanted to grow up as fast as possible,” he says. “But now I don’t want to become an adult.”