Every week Nicotina brings us an unforgettable female character from the movies. This week, Nicotina suggests you meet Crow from Dorota Kędzierzawska’s Polish film Wrony (Crows, 1994).
There is something about Crow (Wrona), played by 10-year-old Karolina Ostrożna, and Maleństwo, played by 4-year-old Kasia Szczepanik, that marks them as being slightly different from the standard realist film children as precocious observers of contemporary life.
It starts with Crow running away from home after being bullied at school and feeling neglected by her working mother. Crow is out there looking for someone to love and be loved, and she finds this in 3-year-old Maleństwo, who she happily kidnaps. The camera frames Crow’s movements in a spectacularly uninhibited manner that is so distant from representations of children committed to pathologising childhood – evident even in realist deployment of the child’s perspective as neutral/innocent and somehow a better lens to see reality with.
Over the years, focusing a camera on a child seems to have become a radical act, given the rousing allegations of hypersexualization that almost any pre-teen body on film has met with. You get two thumbs up only for the Charlie-bit-me variety. Quvenzhané Wallis as Hushpuppy in Beasts of the Southern Wild was perhaps the most recent casualty of this disciplining eye. Crow is fragile yet resilient, framed like Hushpuppy in many ways, but unlike Hushpuppy, who bears the burden of revealing her social environment – a fishing community threatened by misguided politics, modernisation, and hurricanes – Crow is freed from such narrative requirements. She offers us, adults or children, the potential to see ourselves in her and experience her freedom as she navigates her world as a place of vastness, intimacy, threat, love and magic.