Nervous Translation
Why is it that, when destined for adult audiences, narrative films about children so rarely accord their diminutive protagonists the privilege of inhabiting a world of their own? Place a child at the centre of a film, and type will frequently take hold, dictated by the law of genre: either he is a wide-eyed innocent, a seer faced with the horrors of the world that reside beyond his comprehension, or she is a deviously evil soul, ready to wreak havoc. Either way, the child is an interloper in an adult universe, a screen onto which to project all the grown-up desires and anxieties that organize the film. Too often, any attempt at picturing the complicated strangeness of children, let alone the strangeness of the world as
