Karla and Renoir Tug at Hearts in IFFI's Emotional Core
By Manu Shrivastava
In the humming heart of IFFI 2025, where spotlights pierce the shadows of unspoken stories, two films emerged like quiet thunderclaps, each cradling the fragile universe of a child against the crush of adult cruelties and wonders.
On a sun-drenched Sunday, the packed press room at the festival swelled with the kind of raw, collective exhale that only cinema can coax from a room full of sceptics.
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| Bruncher and Tournatzès (right) interacting with the media at IFFI 56 |
Directors and producers of Karla and Renoir, two visions of youth navigating tempests far beyond their years, unspooled the threads of inspiration, heartache, and hard-won triumphs behind their creations, leaving the air thick with questions about how we listen to the smallest voices in our largest dramas.
It began with Karla, a Munich-set reckoning that director Christina Theresa Tournatzès forged from the unyielding ore of her own family's past. This isn't the stuff of histrionic courtroom fireworks; it's a taut, 104-minute whisper of a 12-year-old girl's war for truth in 1962, when she dares to stand against her abusive father in a system rigged to swallow child testimonies whole.
Tournatzès, her voice steady but laced with the weight of years, described the film's genesis as a delicate surgery: excising the sensational to honour the silences, the stutters, the wide-eyed hesitations that make "word against word" battles so excruciatingly real. She explained that they anchored the narrative in the girl's viewpoint, since true dignity often emerges not in bold declarations but in the quiet breaths preceding a vulnerable admission.
The young lead, shielded in a cocoon of care on set, channelled an instinctual rawness that Tournatzès hailed as a resounding success during its Munich debut, a performance so honest it aches. Here in Goa, amid IFFI's eclectic mix, the screening landed differently: a bridge across oceans to spotlight the global scar of sexual violence against minors, where one in five girls worldwide still fights in the dark.
Anchored by a judge who becomes Karla's improbable North Star, the German-language drama unfolds in restrained colour, a testament to uncompromised voices. Tournatzès paused during the Q&A, the room hanging on her words, emphasising that the tale extends beyond one individual to encompass all the young lives society has overlooked.
And then, as if the festival gods had scripted a soft pivot from grit to grace, the conversation flowed into Renoir — not a biopic of the painter, as its title might tease, but a luminous 116-minute dreamscape co-produced across Japan, France, Singapore, the Philippines, Indonesia, and Qatar.
Renoir Co-producer Christophe Bruncher leaned into the mic with a wry smile, framing the film as a canvas of feelings, woven from loose, evocative impressions of an 11-year-old Tokyo girl's inner alchemy in 1987.
Against the bubble of Japan's economic roar, Fuki, our wide-eyed navigator, confronts her father's fading breath, her mother's quiet fractures, and the vertigo of growing up, all while slipping into realms of telepathy, magic tricks, and impish inventions that children wield like shields against the incomprehensible.
Bruncher reflected that such stories endure because they illustrate how young minds reshape harsh realities, transforming overwhelming sorrows into manageable narratives - imagining enchantments to soften grief or incantations to banish isolation. The Japanese-language tale dances between the tangible Tokyo bustle and Fuki's fevered fantasies, charting her bittersweet bloom amid societal shifts that adults romanticise but children simply endure.
The young actor at its center? Already a comet: Best New Performer at the Asia Pacific Screen Awards, her quiet ferocity turning heads from Busan to Berlin. Bruncher embraced the film's lyrical essence, portraying it as an ode to the subtle bravery of youth, where solitude serves not as a burden but as the ignition for creative renewal.
What binds Karla and Renoir in this IFFI moment isn't coincidence, it's conviction. Both films, born of 2025's urgent gaze, refuse to patronise their young protagonists. Karla claws for justice in a grayscale court of law; Fuki paints escape in vibrant, make-believe hues.
Together, they remind us that children's worlds aren't footnotes to ours - they're the fierce, flickering centres, demanding we lean in, not look away. As the presser wrapped, applause rippled like aftershocks: in a festival of spectacles, these stories didn't dazzle. They lingered, insistent as a child's unanswered why.
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