Makes you feel better about humanity
For three seven-year-olds, boarding at a school for the blind and visually impaired is tough-going, but it is also incredibly beautiful.
A fledgling is a baby bird that has just acquired its feathers and is ready to fly. A fledgling will struggle upon leaving the nest, undoubtably land awkwardly on the ground, but it will fly, and though that first flight will be short, it’ll be triumphant. What an apt and vulnerable and glorious name, then, for a documentary about three seven-year-olds who’ve left their homes for a boarding school, where they must learn to navigate a world not fully equipped for their blindness.
Zosia makes up stories and songs, is incredibly talkative and creative, is funny and needy, but also giving. Prone to emotional outbursts, her sensitivity is immense, and who would fault her tantrum-throwing; it’s exhausting learning how to walk without holding her mother’s hand. Oskar taps his fingers and stomps his feet. Drawn to the piano when he first arrives at his new school, he quickly discovers a talent, perhaps an outlet for his heavy and shifting emotions. Kinga is quiet, practical and patient. It is good that her seat is between Zosia and Oskar because she is helpful, too. ‘We are a group,’ they say, and it is only these three children who multi-award-winning documentarian Lidia Duda follows. Never do we hear Duda’s voice asking questions, prodding the three, prompting them. Never do we hear her explaining the children to us. Simply filmed in black and white, there are no distractions from Zosia, Oskar and Kinga.
By following the children silently and letting their days unfold before us, Fledglings is a triumphant example of disability told through lived experience. It’s obvious Duda has succeeded in progressing the Own Voice movement in cinema by letting the children teach us: this is what we look like; this is what we sound like; this is how we grow; this is how we love. Like a symphony wrapped in a single song, it is the everydayness of the unplanned plotline that makes for the magnitude of the film’s mood. If I had one word to describe what the director has gifted us with this documentary, it would be ‘empathy’, but I’d be hard-pressed to leave out that she’s also gifted us an exquisite contemplation of the power of touch.
As an introduction to Fledglings, Duda says the film is an antidote to our unstable, terror-sated world, and it’s true. The film is lifting, and I’d challenge anyone to not feel better about humanity after viewing.
Fledglings screens as part of the Adelaide Film Festival.
Click here for further information, and to book tickets.
Reviewed by Heather Taylor-Johnson
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