Family (A)

Fourteen-year-old Eli and 16-year-old Nina are both suffering in the breakdown of their parents’ once loving marriage. In the battle for custody, the siblings must express their wishes, fears and feelings to a judge. While Nina wants to get away from the family as soon as possible, Eli longs for everything to return to how it was before. Their desires are miles apart. Told in two chapters, the film follows the same three weeks twice: first from Nina’s perspective and then from Eli’s. These mirrored timelines reveal how the same moments can be lived, felt and understood in entirely different ways. Eli and Nina retreat into their own isolated worlds until Nina begins to realise that her younger brother has been carrying the same weight all along, quietly, invisibly, beside her. He has always been there; it is only now that she is truly seeing him. Eli, meanwhile, comes to understand that Nina’s turning away from him was not a rejection but an act of survival and she has been struggling as much as he has. Beneath their opposing choices lies the same longing: for love, recognition and emotional security. A Family reveals how love can fracture under pressure but still find its way back home.

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