New Moons: Alexander David

What would happen if the children of William Golding’s Lord of the Flies (1954) landed on the Scottish island of Summerisle from The Wicker Man (1973)? If they lived long enough there, would they, instead of collapsing into savagery and conflict, reach a state of settlement and build a lasting community, establishing strict rules, rituals, and customs and continuing the ceremonial sacrifice of their own as a necessary act to hold their world together? Would their precepts, beliefs, fears, and magical powers be sufficient to maintain harmony?

In a parallel cinematic universe, this might be what unfolds in Alexander David’s directorial debut, First Age (2023), where the spectator witnesses the carnivalesque yet strictly ordered, self-determined cohabitation of a group of children on a secluded island. Diverging in age, skin colour, skills and expressions, these children share a common life in a village where verbal language has no currency, communication flows through gesture, rhythm, proximity, and death is an unknown phenomenon. According to the voice-over — delivered by a 500-year-old figure, who watches them from distant but does not interfere, living in the forest where the adults of the community are banished — each year during an eclipse the oldest child in the group is sent to leap off the cliff on the far side of the island, to transform into an eternal fish. This paraphysical logic sets the tone of the film, preparing the gaze for something outlandish to come.  

Thus, we enter a mythical and mystic cosmos where childhood – prepubescent and adolescent – is not a prelude to adulthood but a world unto itself: circular, spellbound, and unmoored from adult temporality. Their way of living is idle, hardworking and mischievous all at once, as labour and leisure coexist without contradiction. The film initially pulses with euphoric energy: children burst across the frame dancing in exuberant costumes, like unpinned popcorns ricocheting across the screen. Soon, we view their daily rhythms: cooking, cultivating, cleaning, sleeping, caring, and even procreating. The unapologetically complex and zany disposition of these children deliberately disorients the viewer, a discomfort David seems to court. We become unsettled by their uncanny existence and timelessness in the same way they are unsettled by the forest that is unknown, ominous, and even sacred for them. They seem to exist in an eternal present, with no past nor future — we do not know how these children came to be, or what they will do next. Their world unfolds as a pre-linguistic, pre-moral, and liminal space until the dynamics shift.

The shift occurs when a group of children crosses the forbidden threshold into the forest. There, in a crumbling cottage, they discover books and perplexing films like Nosferatu and Frankenstein – and, with them, death. They begin to desire: to read, to decode, to surpass, or more precisely, to live. It is a cinematic fall from Eden, not through an apple but through a projector beam. They lose the magic, and metaphorically, their innocence. Like the oversized adult shoes they wear but cannot walk in, they outgrow themselves in an instant, much like their peers in the non-fictional world. This transformation reaches its height at the end when the older two remain in the forest, while the younger ones return to the village: “Eternal children run away, into the world of mortals, into the colourless place of those who die forever.” And yet, in a sudden rupture, one of the formerly silent children shouts, “MARIA!”—invoking not only the pregnant girl, but perhaps the archetype of sin, the mother, the myth of the fallen. Here, they may begin to perceive the world through the adult gaze, which becomes entangled with our own.

However, it is not their gaze, but our adult one that becomes unsettled, as it is forced to witness an overt intimacy that was meant to remain private between them. While the early “mating” scenes are depicted through illustrative drawings and mechanical duties, once they are “contaminated” by the forest as ‘adult-to-be’s, their “obligation to procreate” turns into an overt intercourse that forces the adult audience to observe without further reflection. The explicit sexual scene between the pregnant girl and older boy, presented without mediation, creates an unnecessary ethical unease in the film: it is a symbolic moment of transformation, but also a problematic imposition of adult desire onto child-coded characters. It raises difficult questions about voyeurism and cinematic responsibility. Could this loss of innocence — this entry into mortality — be rendered otherwise?

This adult gaze, however, largely recedes in David’s subsequent short film Water Hazard (2024), which centres on yet another pre-adolescent protagonist. Unlike First Age, in Water Hazard, we blend into the world of the main character, and our gaze becomes hers, who constantly glances back, mostly uncomfortably but curiously so. The more she observes her surroundings that are full of masculine traits (i.e., the gestures and muscles of construction workers setting up a pond in a golf field, drum set in the basement, topless young male sunbathing with his glowing skin and tattoos) with composure and oddity, the more the spectator gets tamed, equally unflustered and ready to surrender to whatever the narrative would bring forward. This would be the Barbie doll that is left abandoned afloat in the pool, or Ken that is buried underground, both suggesting the death or obsolescence of conventional girly toys. Central to this tension is the protagonist’s younger sister, who, despite their differing views on tattoos, aesthetics, and bodily presentation, unconsciously engages with her sibling’s unspoken desires. She proposes new male names, pretends to shave her sister’s nonexistent beard, and encourages her to embrace traits coded as masculine. Through this intimate play, the sister becomes a quiet accomplice in the protagonist’s early, tentative bending of gender norms she will soon confront more definitively.

In First Age, the children discover the cottage as a response to their collective curiosities – a space of enchantment and ambiguity, while in Water Hazard, the protagonist’s search leads her to a mysterious yet joyful adult figure in the water. Adorned with tattoos and radiating a gentle smile, he embodies everything the girl seems to yearn for. Perhaps he is her future self, marked with tattoos of her cat and her name on his wrist – a spectral projection of what she might become. But as in First Age, time here is fluid, irrelevant. When the girl asks, “Which name will I choose?”, the only response is the splash of water; an ephemeral gesture that dismisses the fixation on linear time or predetermined identity. Instead, it gently affirms the value of living in the suspended, eternal now.