Anton's Right Here

Directed by Lyubov Arkus

How is it possible to feel someone elses pain? The hero of this film is an autistic boy. His life is divided between an apartment with peeling walls on the outskirts of a large city, and a mental hospital. Anton comes into the frame when he is on the point of becoming a patient at a residential neuropsychiatric institution, a place where people with the sort of diagnosis that he has do not live long. The author, the camera, the hero. The distance between them shrinks with every passing minute, and the author has to enter the shot and become a character in the story. However, it is not a story about how one person helped another, but about how one person recognized herself in another. About how there is Another who lives in each of us and must be destroyed every day inside of us in order to survive.