L'hiver de Timo

Greetings again from the darkness. This 15 minute short film from Italy follows young Timo as he and his family face tragedy during the winter season. Writer-director Giulio Mastromauro has been making short films since 2012, and this is co-writer Andrea Brusa's seventh short film in six years. The production level is strong, and we are drawn in quickly.

Timo and his family are part of a Greek community, and their family business is tied to the carnival rides for a traveling Funfair. Timo's mother lays deathly ill in the family's trailer, as the next opening day rapidly approaches. First time actor Christian Petaroscia plays Timo, a quiet boy who observes all and readily jumps in to help prepare the rides, as his father (Giulio Beranek) stays by the woman's bed. The boy's grandparents (Babak Karimi, Elisabetta De Vito) are concerned for Timo's well-being as things turn bleak.

The film is a testament to the strength of a community and family, but also the isolation when a loved one's time comes. Another sentiment that ties in with Mastromauro's film: when the young die, they are forever young.

Timo's winter is a touching short film where grief is expressed by everything that the characters aren't able to say to each other. Timo is going through the hardest time of his life, as he must witnessing his beloved mother's last days in bad due to an illness that is never properly named. Timo's father holds the budern on his shoulders and as everyone around Timo tries to protect him from the distress caused by his mother's illness, we follow this young kid as he tries to process what's going on around him. The short is spoken in greek and that adds value to the atmosphere. It's always hard to convey difficult emotions within few minutes of short, but the screenwriter and director is able through a crafted work of emotional narrative built over key moments of silence and helped by a production design - a travelling funfair during winter, with no lights on or customers cheering, waiting for the good season to arrive.

No doubts, the star is the young Christian Petaroscia. But the story, the beautiful photography, the pieces of Funfair rides are the small bricks defining a world near to its end, a form of pure isolation, a story about death as seed of hope , grandparents as the support of their grandson, like in East, a father looking for work as only reasonable cure to the so painful lost. A beautiful film and a powerful message. And its special bitterness with taste more of salt. More important, the fair definition of family face to lost of its familiar order.