Before Flying Back to the Earth

The director of the film visited the children's hospital where boys and girls are sick with leukemia. However, he does not find a place filled with great pain and tears, but rather a place full of peace, smiles, strength and faith in the fact that even the ill can be lucky enough to return again among the healthy. The filmmaker captures life in the treatment center without trying to depict a portrait of the sick themselves – but rather to create a parable of strong and interesting individuals, who involuntarily find themselves in captivity. The rhythm of the film is not a reflection of a normal perception of time, but is subordinated to how the patients in the hospital perceive time, which according to their testimonies runs much faster. The individual sequences, showing the daily operation of the hospital, are regularly separated by sped–up static shots of a tree. The repeating pictures not only puts the lives of the children patients into real time coordinates, but also becomes a symbol of the normal life outside where the children are temporarily denied access. The film is supplemented with black and white photographs of the children's lives and their treatment, which can be understood as a desire to stop the rapid pace of development of the illness in an attempt to use every moment that life offers us.