Timo's Winter

In the winter, everything in the fairground shuts down. A shortage of custom means it's time to close the rides and focus on maintenance and repairs. Timo's life is shutting down too. His mother is getting more and more ill. Terrified of losing her, he struggles to function, wandering around in a distracted shape whilst his extended family try to comfort him or find him things to do.

Writer/director Giulio Mastromauro lost his mother at a young age and this film, made when he had just passed the age at which she died, is inspired by that experience. Its young star, Christian Petaroscia, is an extraordinary talent. With practically no dialogue, he holds the viewer's attention in every frame. The Timo he creates is only just old enough to have grasped the enormity of his situation but has already learned that emotions - or at least the manifestation of them - can be suppressed. In the early scenes he seems exhausted by his effort to achieve this and by his silent struggle to make sense of things. Later, when he lets it out, the force of his emotion is overwhelming.

There's many a film out there that takes an hour and a half to say what Mastromauro packs into just 15 minutes. He's aided by Sandro Chessa's cinematography, which captures the empty fairground so well that we can almost smell the oil and soap and dirt in the chill winter air. A landscape that we are used to seeing full of flashing lights and bright colours, it has become an assemblage of greys. Growing up in such a place might seem magical, and perhaps there's still a little magic there that Timo can use, but for the most part he inhabits a backstage world. The fairground is there to create illusions; the lives of its inhabitants go unseen.

There's also a quiet celebration here of extended families and the unspoken love that can hold them together in tough times. Although nothing comforts the boy, he clearly feels safe in this space; we never get the sense that there is any danger of him not being provided for. He is distant from the adults not just because of the particular nature of his distress but also because of the barriers of perception that exist between young children and adults. He inhabits a world that is not quite theirs. What is happened might begin to change that. There's a rawness about him, confronted by the horrors of the world too soon, but also a formidable strength that speaks to a life yet to come.

One of the strongest of this year's shorts, Timo's Winter has already won several awards, and as the Oscars loom up ahead, it's going to be tough to beat.