Comment

This film features a situation which is revisited three times over. Mandy, a deaf mute child, encounters children who try to play with her.

Returning to this situation again and again, each with its own variations, allows the audience to follow Mandy’s incremental progress in relating to other children.

In each incarnation of this scene another situation grows, that of the parent’s dilemma underlying the whole film – Should they keep Mandy at home under their protection, or should they do the opposite and put her into the institution where she can come into contact with other children?

This first scene takes place in the back yard at her parent’s house, where Mandy is on her own, a prisoner of the walls. A group of children of her age try to catch her attention through a chain-link covered gap in the wall. They ask her if they can borrow her bike, but a combination of fear and her deafness stops her from responding to them, which makes the children angry. The end of the scene is filmed through the panes of an upstairs window, where her Mum and Dad watch her, down below in the back yard, like prison guards in a watchtower.