From Omeleto.
A young girl plays rugby.
Nine-year-old Alisha plays rugby. The only girl on her team, she’s a strong player and the captain. During one match, she clashes on the pitch with her opponent Ben, and the pair have a big fight.
Enraged, a banished Alisha takes out her anger on Ben’s belongings in the locker room, especially on something she knows he values deeply but is trying to hide. But as the conflict spirals, Alisha discovers the other children are not the source of the issue.
Directed and written by Alessandro Riconda, this powerful, empathetic short drama does what many sports stories do wonderfully on film: balance kinetic, dynamic visual storytelling while using the overt clash of athletic competition to intensify themes and internal conflicts. Through the story of a young female rugby player, Alisha faces ideas about what young girls and boys should or should not do. But in her conflict with Ben, she gains a wider understanding of how these ideas get cemented into lived experience. Combined with the rough-and-tumble nature of rugby, the film creates a thought-provoking and insightful powder keg of ideas and emotions.
Told with naturalistic visuals that alternate between the quietly intimate and the dynamic and muscular, the storytelling gives us a quiet intro to Alisha before we’re launched right into the thick of the action, with muscular camerawork and gritty cinematography capturing the intensity of rugby, as well as Alisha’s talent and appreciation by her fellow team members. But the clash between Alisha and Ben is visceral in a different way — the blows and crashes feel personal. But the aftermath feels stinging in a different way, one that makes Alisha come to a wider understanding of how things are for Ben.
Young actor Thana Ogunlade — herself a star youth rugby player — has an impressively commanding yet understated onscreen presence even as a child, which makes Alisha’s talent and athletic prowess immediately legible in this short narrative. But she also has an emotional directness that brings her inner journey to life as she gains insight into her foe, played by young performer Cameron Bell with great range. It would be easy to understand if Alisha weaponizes that insight to hurt him. Instead, she begins to understand the complex, knotty nature of oppression in a more dimensional way — and she discovers compassion alongside competition.
Well-crafted, lucid and intelligent, JUST KIDS observes an interesting contemporary conundrum. Girls are told that they can do anything, and like Alisha, they’ve taken it to heart, though they come up against obstacles and stereotypes when stretching the boundaries, whether it’s as small as locked bathrooms or more insidious as criticism over their looks. But the film tackles the other end of the spectrum, observing how the messaging around boys is still rigid about who or what they should and should not be. It observes how these ideas affect not just the people they influence and often control, but the people around them. And much of the film’s impact is how painful it feels to the youngest and most vulnerable of those who are just learning them.
JUST KIDS. Courtesy of Alessandro Riconda at https://alericonda.com.
