by SARAH ROWLAND

Sometimes it’s just a little too early in the morning to watch a grieving six-year-old girl being ripped away from her dying mother. Like most press screenings, The Three Rooms of Melancholia was presented in the a.m., making the haunting images of war-ravaged orphans that much harder to digest. Then again, is there ever really a good time to witness the horrors of war and its effect on children?

As the title suggests, Pirjo Honkasalo’s devastatingly beautiful documentary is divided into three sections. The first is set in a military academy just outside of St. Petersburg. Here, we follow the daily routines of pre-teen boys who have either been picked up off the streets or dropped off by in-laws too broke to care for them. The title of this section is called “Longing,” which perfectly sums up the overall feel of the piece.

In between target practice and uniform inspections, the boys are on the horn begging whichever living relatives still remain to let them come home for winter vacation. This segment is particularly heartbreaking because the young cadets, who all seem to have the same faraway look in their ice-blue eyes, are on the cusp of being attention-starved children turned detached killing machines.

The next uplifting chapter, “Breathing,” focuses on the bombed-out slums of Grozny, the capital of Chechnya. This is where we meet the aforementioned six-year-old and her two younger sisters as they say goodbye to their only living parent. If the sound of her wails doesn’t get ya, the sight of her using the cuff of her sleeve to wipe away her bedridden mother’s tears will.

Before we meet her, though, Honkasalo takes her time capturing the young girl’s surroundings—from the uncovered oil pits in the backyard, to the emaciated homeless out front to the Swiss cheese shack she calls a home.

For the final installment, “Remembering,” Honkasalo heads to an orphanage in the Islamic Republic of Ingushetia, where our nameless trio of sisters has been sent to live. Day one, and the frightened, freshly orphaned girls are forced to go through some sort of religious ceremony involving the blood of a sacrificial sheep being painted on their faces. Presumably, this welcome-to-the-neighbourhood tradition is meant to calm their nerves. But it only seems to scare the living shit out of them. We also meet other abused children: kids who have been living like stray dogs in cardboard boxes, a girl who has been gang-banged by soldiers and a boy whose shell-shocked father tried to push him off a balcony.

What makes this meditation on the cost of war so powerful is how Honkasalo only uses images that require very little explanation. She’ll introduce a character by giving a name, age and one or two lines of back-story, and that’s all we need. And she never lingers on one character for too long before she’s on to the next, which only seems to add to the enormity of this seemingly endless tragedy.

The Three Rooms of Melancholia opens Friday, June 16

>> Movie Listings