A summer at her grandparents' house becomes the backdrop against which eight-year-old Katya slowly registers that the adults around her are coming apart, in Nastia Korkia's 2025 drama Short Summer.
What is Short Summer about?
Katya has been sent to stay with her grandparents while, at a distance the film keeps mostly off screen, the Chechen war reshapes the world the adults inhabit. Her grandparents' marriage is fraying at the same time, and the film tracks how a child registers that kind of unraveling: not through explanation but through small shifts in tone, silence, and routine that she is too young to fully name but not too young to feel. Korkia builds the film around Katya's point of view, keeping the historical backdrop present without turning the film into a history lesson, so what stays in focus is one girl's season inside a household quietly coming undone.
About the cast
Maiia Pleshkevich plays Katya, with Yakov Karykhalin, Aleksandr Karpushin, Vesna Jovanović, and Aleksandr Feklistov filling out the household and the wider circle around her. The cast draws on the film's German, French, and Serbian co-production base, and the performances lean on restraint and observed behavior rather than heightened drama to carry a story told from a child's vantage point.
Context & significance
Short Summer belongs to a strand of European art-house drama that filters historical upheaval through domestic, small-scale detail rather than sweeping depiction, closer in spirit to a family chronicle than a war film. Running 101 minutes, it gives Katya's summer room to breathe, letting mood and accumulated detail do the work that dialogue or plot mechanics might otherwise carry in a more conventional drama.
Watching Short Summer on Ktime
Short Summer is available on K-Time with Persian dubbing and Persian subtitles, so Farsi-speaking viewers can follow the film in their own language. The film's page is free to read for anyone; watching requires a K-Time account, part of a platform built with a Farsi-first interface designed for Iranian audiences around the world.