Ivo prefers not to talk. Ivo prefers not to eat. Ten-year-old Ivo, on the edge of impending adolescence, does not want to grow. Carol Mavor and Megan Powell’s black-and-white film is a cine-poem, chock-full of still and moving imagery: cocoons, sprouting mushrooms, butterflies feeding with their coiled tongues, a field planted with two hospital beds, an empty nest being torn in two, a bowl of over-spilling milk, a mother, a father and a boy. With the combined sensibility of Chris Marker’s haunting La Jetée and Francesca Woodman’s sensual photographs, the viewer is taken through the drama and terror of a boy’s anorexia.
