4 ideas
On a Greek island in 1936, young Melia and her older sister Myrto live in their grandfather's house, where a stuffed wildcat sits in a glass case. When the Metaxas dictatorship takes power, their student cousin Niko, a political opponent of the regime, has to go into hiding. The girls are drawn into keeping his secret while their school, their teachers and the adults around them change under the new order.
A child cannot read an ideology, so she perceives a regime change through its side effects. Adults whisper, a teacher is replaced, certain books disappear, and a relative suddenly cannot be mentioned.
The regime reaches children through what a movement offers them rather than through its doctrine. Uniforms, marching, songs and the status of being included all work on them, which makes an older child vulnerable to enthusiasm before she can understand what she is endorsing. The split between the two sisters' responses shows that the same household can produce both allegiance and resistance, depending on who grabs a child's need to belong.
The stuffed wildcat behind glass stands for untamed life that has been preserved but immobilized, just as spirit and dissent are frozen under the dictatorship. The younger sister imagines the animal is alive, and in that private imagination she keeps a zone of freedom that official control cannot reach.