The Autumn of Zao
2015 · 18m
Directed by Nikolaus Roche-Kresse
Genres: coming-of-age, drama, fantasy
Tones: contemplative, melancholic, mythic
A terminally ill boy living by a lake follows a little girl into the forest to hear the legend of the lake monster, in a hymn to dream, life, and childhood.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
A hymn to childhood and dream-logic sounds like the kind of thing that gets programmed to death, but Roche-Kresse's refusal to sentimentalize the dying boy—treating him instead as an equal witness to mythology—is genuinely unsettling in ways most festival darlings wouldn't dare.
The film situates itself deliberately in the European art-cinema tradition of mythic coming-of-age (Tarkovsky's influence hovers throughout), and the restraint in its formal choices—how it frames the lake, how it lets silence do the narrative work—demonstrates a filmmaker conscious of his lineage and rigorous enough to earn it.
The decision to follow the girl into the forest rather than the boy—a subtle reversal of narrative authority that reframes who holds the story—transforms what could've been maudlin into something genuinely strange and alive, and that one choice carries the entire emotional weight.