A little fish that murmurs that it is alive. A village where children do not know death. In his first feature film, Alexander David creates a community without adults, where children are governed by strict beliefs and where loss of innocence is the awareness of a world beyond their island.
One of the many charms of The First Age is the peculiar way of seeing the world – a world which is an island where apparently only children live – built from a perspective that belongs to the children and manages to avoid apology or demonization. The film invites us to enter its sensual and allegorical world where the concept of adulthood has no bearing. The oldest hide in the forest or participate in a ritual that puts their beliefs in eternal life to the test.
British psychoanalytic writer Adam Phillips wrote in an essay “It isn’t simply that rules are made to be broken: the rules tell you that there is something to break.”. And this is yet another proof of the great magic in actor Alexander David’s directorial debut, allowing us to step into an admirable and uncanny universe, lost in time, with the freshness and curiosity of discovery from its protagonists but also of himself for the first time in the territory of fictional filmmaking, while managing to question us spectators, at the present moment. (Susana Santos Rodrigues)
