One Last Summer

by Aleksandra Terpińska

Next Step 2017

Feature Film

One Last Summer tells the story of Gaja, a young Polish woman who’s trying to free herself from an overbearing family that she finds dysfunctional, numbed by material comforts, and from a patriarchal model that she rejects. She moves to Vienna with her boyfriend Michal for one summer of freedom and insouciance, to find the anticonformism and idealism that she seeks. She ends up working as an au pair for Lina and Thomas, a comfortable, older, mixed (Lina is of Turkish origin) couple expecting their first child. Between them will emerge a triangular, fragile and complex relationship motivated by desire, seduction and fascination but also manipulation, jealousy and disillusion.

One Last Summer is a subtle and intimate coming-of-age tale about the ins and outs of love, the power play at work in romantic relationships, the things we give to be able to truly love, all the while tackling the role of conformism and social integration.