Fourteen-year-old Mira wants to spend New Year’s Eve with her friend Lera. Initially, her stepfather disagrees. But, after a tense family dinner, she is given permission.

Natalya Meshchaninova’s Hubert Bals Fund-supported film MY LITTLE NIGHTTIME SECRET shows the blindness around a teenager torn between the need to be rescued and the impossibility of communicating. Bookending the film are just a few scenes in which Meshchaninova engineers a precise depiction of family dynamics: the glaring Christmas colours and decorations becoming the backdrop to an atmosphere that hints at quotidian power games and intimations of abuse. Mira’s quiet despair is fleetingly transformed into acts of intense, magical courage or of clamouring self-harm. The double bind effected by older, protective figures jumps from the home to the party: it is reflected in both Mira’s mean friendship with 16-year-old Lera and her experience of first love.

Meshchaninova poignantly conveys what it means to live with a terrible secret enclosed in your chest, dragged like a burden, endured in silence and shame: a great unsaid colouring every interaction, self-perception and hope about the other. The film presents a girl’s teenage years as an impossible test, with Mira longing for an escape into adulthood or a return to lost childhood.