Black on white: a little African boy's skin, a leopard's spots and a zebra's stripes all stand out from the snow. The mix served up by the Russian director Natalia Chernysheva for her final year film is geographically unexpected but graphically magnificent. The paper snowflake sent from a northern country triggers a miracle, covering the African savannah in snow. The little boy who got the amazing letter discovers the joys of winter, such as swallowing a snowflake and sliding and rolling in the snow. We are taken into a very stylish world in both narrative and visual terms, where the only other colour is the red of the coat and fire that warm up the animals and the little boy. That magic of fire eventually puts an end to the snow by consuming the snowflake. The sparks that escape from the little boy's hut give the savannah its colours, the hot and fiery red and orange. The little boy also picks an orange feather, as a piece of his world, to send to his correspondent so that the original letter-writer may enjoy a similar experience. We can only hope that one day this gets made into a film by someone with as much talent as the young director behind this one.
