In this exquisitely crafted poem of a film, a father's desperate attempt to communicate with his autistic son becomes a metaphor for a much larger futility. Philip Groning captures the stillness and abstraction of an autistic child's world, in black-and-white cinematography that turns an Alpine resort-where the father has taken his son for the summer-into a canvas of contemplative distance, alternating with the close-up that shuts out the rest of the world. Only four characters inhabit this universe: the father (Michael Schech), who has rescued his son from a clinic in hopes of reaching him through love; the boy, Sebastian (Philipp Rankl); a chambermaid (Lene Beyer); and a fellow vacationer (Barbara vom Baur), whose affection only draws out in the father the impossibility of reciprocal love. Young Philipp Rankl is the true revelation of the film: as Sebastian, he becomes that child who finds a world in the infinite depths of a marble, a boy whose intense isolation mirrors that which he senses all around him. Summer received the Munich Film Award for 1987.