Growing Pains
2021 · 26m · Russia
Directed by Ellen Rodnianski
Genres: coming-of-age, drama
Tones: contemplative, dark, melancholic
A pregnant 15-year-old is pushed out of her Russian school ahead of a city inspection to protect its reputation. Rejected by family, friends and the baby's father, she wanders the city as her anger grows.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
The premise lands exactly where you'd expect—institutional cruelty, teenage isolation, justified rage—and Rodnianski refuses to subvert or complicate it, which is almost refreshing in its refusal to be clever about suffering.
A formally rigorous dissection of institutional abandonment that situates itself squarely in the Russian social-realist lineage; the film's control over pacing and visual restraint recalls Sokurov's economy—every frame earns its melancholy.
The specificity lives in how Rodnianski tracks the girl's body moving through the city—not as spectacle but as the only continuous point of reference—and lets that spatial exhaustion do the emotional work that dialogue never attempts.