The Days Run Away Like Wild Horses Over the Hills

The film opens revealing what we will discover are the last joys of young womanhood: three teenage girls saunter and cavort innocently to Sir Mix-A-Lot’s Baby Got Back, ignorant of the trials that await them.

The Days Run Away abandons any form of narrative and instead delves into a realist, feminist odyssey centred around free-flowing insights into the lives of women of various backgrounds who are struggling with different stages of life. Its second act focuses on single women with children, and most of the scenes are unscripted, creating an unpredictable but always warm dialogue. The mother, clearly exhausted, lies on the floor in two scenes, struggling to match the energy of the child she loves. Her only escape is to smoke a joint on the balcony; she prefers the noise of the worksite to the noise of the child.

The film appears to be shot on a home camcorder giving it a domestic feel, yet framing women in their small surroundings with extreme close-ups, and often obscuring the older women behind glass or displaying them merely as reflections on the TV screen. When the young mother decides to put on makeup, her face is blown up to powerful dimensions with the most striking extreme close-up example, and as she puts on mascara and eyeliner and lipstick, colour slowly oozes onto the frame.

That colour is prominent in the third act which centres around ageing and womanhood beyond the family. But here, the colour does not have positive connotations – instead it is used to display decay: sepia dirt-toned garden, the antiquated wall paper and the colour TV.

Marcin is fascinated by the mundane minutiae in everyday female life: it’s as if he’s inviting the viewer into these living spaces to be witnesses and the result is an honest humanist triptych of femininity.

Sean Gallen

The Days Run Away Like Wild Horses Over the Hills does not yet have a UK release date.

Read more of our reviews and interviews from the festival here.

For further information about Berlin Film Festival 2015 visit here.