Anesthesia(Separation)
Hold still. This won’t hurt.
A nine-year-old boy overhears his surgeon father admit a mistake that may have cost a man his life, and has to decide whether to hide the truth like the adults do, or become the one person in the house who won’t.
10 minutes · Drama · A proof of concept
Shortlisted — Young Director Award (Dream Pitch), Cannes 2026
A quiet house. A nine-year-old boy fakes an illness to stay home, breaks a thermometer covering the lie, and is locked in the basement. That night he creeps upstairs and, through the glass of the family aquarium, watches his surgeon father confess to his mother that something went wrong in an operation — and that he told no one.
The boy doesn’t understand it. He understands only that the father, a man who fixes people, has done something he can’t take back, and is hiding it. What follows is a child living inside that secret while learning, from everyone around him, the same lesson: telling the truth costs you, and hiding keeps you safe.
It ends in his father’s car, with a single question the boy has been holding the whole film — and the answer that tells him exactly who his father is.
I was nine when I sat beside my father at the kitchen table and heard him tell my mother he had made a mistake at work that day. My father was a cardiac surgeon.
This film is built from that memory. The aquarium, the broken thermometer, the night in the kitchen — none of these is invented. I grew up among people who believed that being strong meant never admitting you were wrong, and I watched how that silence shaped children who tried to earn love by being perfect.
The boy is learning the exact lesson that is quietly destroying his father.
I could only write it from a distance — from Berlin, years later. That distance is what made the memory visible.
On the surface: a family holding a secret. Underneath: how a father unknowingly performs a kind of surgery on his son, teaching him that in this family, love is earned by hiding what’s broken. The film is about the moment a child receives that inheritance and decides what to do with it.
The aquarium is the film’s central image. It runs through the whole film, and its meaning turns: the state of the water, and the fish, shifts across the film — a quiet measure of the family.
- Cast A nine-year-old boy, a four-year-old sister, two parents in their late 30s
- Camera Stays with the boy — his height and his point of view
- Sound No music score. An aquarium sound motif that swells to open water, and small domestic sounds: footsteps, keys, breath
- References Nan Goldin (domestic weight, family texture) · The Kid with a Bike, Dardenne (2011) · The Return, Zvyagintsev (2003) · The Spirit of the Beehive, Erice (1973)
- Stage Development through late 2026 — exploring Berlin production to optimise budget and locations
- Script Screenplay final, 6 pages
- Attached Writer/director Matvey Krivolapov · DP tentatively attached: John London (TIFF premiere)
- Producer Open
- Shoot February 2027
- Open to Producers, co-production and funding conversations
Matvey Krivolapov
Film director based in Berlin, originally from Siberia. His work has been recognised at the Rome Prisma Film Awards, the Golden Earth Film Award (Dallas), Fashionclash Film Festival, and 24 Frame Al Secondo, Rome. Anesthesia is his first project developed through the Young Director Award circuit at Cannes.