Ava

Teenage summer love - story told hundreds times and still done in a very fresh way.

Tender and heartwarming movie with great camera shoots and awesome soundtrack.

What a poignant but simple tale of a thirteen years old girl who lives with her baby sister and single mother and who discovers one day that she will slowly get blind in a few months. Then she becomes awry, especially as a teen. She steals a dog from a vagrant, a gypsy in his twenties, a wayward young gypsy searched by the police. With him, the young girl will try to get pleasure in life before getting prisoner of the forever darkness. You can think some minutes about a sort of BONNIE AND CLYDE scheme. A desperate but no totally hopeless story however.

For a debut feature, this is nicely done, with some pleasantly-surprising turns that help avoid the cliches of the coming-of-age-rebellion trope.

As someone else has said, she doesn't really need to be 13 for the plot to work. Something like 16 would have been fine, and the fact that Noee was older than 13 at the time of filming would not have been so obvious. However, IMHO, she is excellent in this - even better than in Slalom, which I also saw recently.

Despite the underlying tragedy of her situation (horrifying disease prognosis, useless mother...), there are some nice touches of humour (loved the dog on the moped) and sweetness from the supporting characters (such as the bride).

Recommended.

28th STOCKHOLM INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL. DAY 1, NOV 8th 2017. Swedish premiere of "Ava" (2017).

A beautiful, well-paced drama about being on the border between childhood and adulthood, "Ava" is a promising feature debut from Léa Mysius.

There is fine acting, a strong screenplay, good direction and deep emotions of fear, frustration, curiosity, excitement, joy, love, sensuality, as 13-year-old Ava learns she has an incurable eye disease that will soon make her blind. She tries to cope with it as best she can -- all while falling in love with an older boy and running away from home, during a hot summer on the French Atlantic coast.

AVA is set on an idyllic seaside town during a typical French summer holiday were the 13-year-old title hero learns that her sight is deteriorating, (brilliant performance from Noee Abita who was 18 at the time for obvious reasons). This dilemma forces Ava to create her own world, where along the way she befriends a young Gypsy boy and his dog. They form a pact and hit the road as they make a run from the law and life itself. The young director, Lea Mysius, mixes it up with neorealism, a bit of pop culture, and some surreal moments, capturing perfectly the mindset of a teenager going through puberty during her pending ordeal.