By Sascha Ormanns. The camera pans away from the black of the opening titles and shows the bottom view of a face filled with emptiness and sadness. It belongs to a man standing in front of a fresh grave, frozen without motion. The childlike voice-over of a girl introduces him as her father – and herself as Daisy. “So I have to tell you about the terrible thing that happened to me“, she continues. Daisy, the five-year-old narrator of Matthew Sanger’s BLUEBERRY, is one of two protagonists. And while her voice-over as well as her actions show her childlike-naive view of the world within this film, the picturesque images deliver all kinds of indications that this must be a maybe enviable but nonetheless positive transfiguration of sad facts, which Daisy is still too young to understand. But the viewer him- or herself quickly notices thanks in part to smartly set hints that the actual reality of the film has to differ massively from Daisy's narrated version: For example she naturally believes her father that her mother has gone on a trip with Uncle Barry, and she proudly produces the postcard she seems to have received from her. Alas, her father's reaction and a close-up reveal that both the alleged vacation and Daddy's state of mind are not what they seem to the little girl.

With BLUEBERRY Matthew Danger and his co-author Darren Bender tell a story which displays a palpable melancholy, and which shows a man having to work through the fact that his wife has left him. But his pain and the depression that is enveloping him more and more gradually distances him from his daughter. The precise direction on the one hand and the said naive-childlike view of the world on the other both contribute to the effect that the film is never lost in overly depressing sadness but still offers enough space to empathise with the protagonists. Although BLUEBERRY cleverly manages to place red herrings (especially brilliantly at the film's climax), it ultimately has to be noted that the filmmakers luckily abstain from using any bad-spirited surprises in the film. Anything else would have been, to use Daisy's words, "nonsical" and wouldn't have made any sense whatsoever.

Links

• BLUEBERRY (GB 2009. Matthew Sanger)
• It Felt Like a Feature – An interview with Matthew Sanger
• Realism for the Art, Romance for the Market – Nils Bothmann about the British film market