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SOURCE-LED EDITORIAL REVIEW
01
THEMATIC CENTER
coming of age02
NARRATIVE PRESSURE
the journey03
FORM
documentary04
RECORD ANCHORS
generation · future · worldThe record for It's Our Time! yields three coordinates specific to its premise—generation, future, and world. That vocabulary places coming of age at the center and gives the journey its dominant tension. It establishes a documentary baseline, not a borrowed score; criticism must still ask what the form does with that material.
It's Our Time! brings coming of age into contact with the journey through documentary. That intersection is our Fresh Take: judge the premise less by its familiarity than by how precisely that combination makes its conflict legible. The existing editorial note adds this view: A sensitive, fully inhabited film whose direction lets emotion surface with precision.
It's Our Time! (2020) arrives with the coordinates of a documentaire film situated in 2020s cinema. The record credits Susanne Erler with the direction and places Steff Jungen and Bartosz Burzyński in the foreground. With a contained running time, the useful question is not to invent an invisible intention, but to notice how these documented choices shape audience expectations before the first frame.
Read as documentary, the film carries the pressure of the journey. Growing up appears less as a single threshold than as a series of renunciations, experiments, and borrowed stories before finding one's own measure. The most precise critical test is therefore what movement undoes rather than merely which destination is reached. Intimate drama moves action into glances, waiting, and withheld words. It asks for attention without impatience: progress may register in a change of voice or a new distance between two bodies.
The counterpoint asks what the adult must unlearn, rather than only what the young character still needs to acquire. Instead of asking whether the film confirms the expected story of coming of age, the sharper question is whether it changes the person, place, or institution with the power to define it. The twist is to measure action not by its noise, but by what a character can no longer conceal.
THE VERDICT, REFRAMED
The takeaway: restraint may be the most decisive form of action here. Here, coming of age changes meaning under the pressure of the journey.
THE DOCUMENTARY STARTING POINT
The young generation sees their future at risk. They rebel against a lifestyle that threatens to destroy the world. The corona crisis also highlighted the deficits of our globalized economy and society. Does this crisis hold a chance for change for the better? The film draws a picture of the mood of the young generation and goes on a search for traces of ideas and concepts for a world after Corona in France, Germany and Poland. What is really important for young Europeans and how do they assess their future prospects? What scares them and what makes them hope? And who stands in their way and brakes? The TV presenter Aline Abboud meets young activists and artists for this, but she also listens to the opposing voices. Especially in Poland the youth are deeply divided, more and more are getting involved in conservative or nationalist right-wing organizations, while the country is slowly drifting into an anti-democratic dictatorship.
Original review by The Film Editorial Desk. No audience testimony or independent critic identity is fabricated.- Year
- 2020
- Runtime
- 89 min
- Direction
- Susanne Erler
- Performers
- Steff Jungen · Bartosz Burzyński · Emilia Roig · Ursula Sladek · Priscillia Ludosky · Patrick Weil · Andrzej Duda · Assa Traoré