I really expected to like this film. I love a lot of foreign cinema; I have a real soft spot for coming-of-age movies; I enjoy slower paced storytelling; and I'm happy to spend time with interesting characters even when there's not a lot happening in a film.
...But I only managed to sit through half of this before I just got so frustrated with it I had to turn it off.
I know that only sitting through half of it doesn't really qualify me to pass comment on the film as a whole, but what I saw was so incredibly tedious that I couldn't bring myself to watch the rest of it. The voice acting was unconvincing, the characters were two dimensional - and not especially likable - and I have to disagree with the other people who have commented and say that I didn't even find the photography especially impressive.
As a project, compiling a year or so of photographs into a sequence that could be presented as a narrative is quite an interesting idea, and this could have been quite a sweet short film. However, there were points where the story that had been attached to the images seemed so lazy and simplistic (it reminded me of Christine Jesperson's art projects in 'Me And You And Everyone We Know' in places), that the final product didn't fulfil it's potential. And I just don't think there was enough to it to justify a feature-length run time.
If you haven't seen the film already, some alternatives I would recommend seeing instead are 'How The Garcia Girls Spent Their Summer', 'Duck Season' and 'XXY'.