Anton's Right Here

How can you feel the pain of another person? The protagonist is Anton, a boy with autism. His life is spent between a run-down apartment house on the outskirts of a big city in Russia and a rural facility for the mentally ill. The camera captures Anton at the moment when he is about to become a patient in a psychiatric ward—a place where people with Anton’s condition don’t live long. The Author, the Camera, the Protagonist. The distance between them is shrinking by the minute. At some point the Author enters the frame and becomes a character of the story. This film, however, is not about one person helping another. It is a story about one person recognizing himself in someone else. There is always Someone Else living inside every one of us. Every day we must kill this Someone Else in order to survive.