The Children Will Come
2017 · 19m · North Macedonia
Directed by Ana Jakimska
Tones: contemplative, melancholic
A young teacher sent to a remote mountain village finds no children waiting — only the school's elderly janitor.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
The premise promises weird—a ghost-story setup in a schoolhouse—but the film seems more interested in restraint than rupture, which is either a clever subversion of folk-horror tropes or just... slow. Depends on your patience for what the empty room is actually saying.
Jakimska's command of negative space and the unsaid—the way absence becomes the real subject—places this squarely in a lineage of Eastern European modernist cinema where landscape and silence do the heavy lifting. The 19 minutes feel earned, each quiet moment deliberate.
The decision to keep the camera still and let dread accrue through what *isn't* there rather than what is—that's the filmmaking choice that elevates this from premise into something genuinely unsettling, and it costs nothing but patience and an editor who trusts the viewer.