Xenia Natalenko

A deeply personal study of motherhood as a ‘rite of passage’. It interweaves moments from the filmmaker’s childhood, family life and psychotherapy with world events, including the Holocaust, the Vietnam War and the Chernobyl nuclear accident, to evoke the complex inner world of maternal experience. Grethel’s tale from the fairy story Hansel and Grethel juxtaposes the personal story with a mythical exploration of freedom and individual responsibility.

A young man has a secret crush on his teacher and rather than admit his feelings to anyone, he takes his own life. He tells his "last secret" in a suicide note to his sister, because his parents would never understand. The final tragedy occurs when we find that the teacher has a secret crush of his own.