CinemaWorld Film Festival

A feature that focuses on loss, grief and redemption, Daly’s sophomore film promises to intrigue audiences with its carnality, sexual intensity and seductive quality. Her film was inspired in part by a haunting teenage memory of a girl’s disappearance in her own village in Sussex (The Guardian).

Working with Daly was “the real deal”, as co-star Rachel Griffith describes. She considers Daly an “auteur” – one whose vision is so specific and delicate that her movies are utterly unique and cohesive to her specific lens (SBS Movies). Indeed, with her use of fixed shots, deliberate framing and minimal scoring, Daly has carefully weaved a complex tale of withheld grief and reluctant desires in this film.

Australian actor Griffith stars as Margaret, a grieving divorcee. Her quietly powerful performance has earned her critical acclaim, so much so that critics have praised her mere presence as reason enough to commend Mammal (Variety). She was nominated for Best International Actress at the Irish Film and Television Awards.

Barry Keoghan stars alongside Griffiths as Joe, a shiftless, vulnerable youth who finds temporary solace in her solicitude. His distinctively physicality and animalistic portrayal has earned him a nomination for Best Leading Actor in the Irish Film and Television Awards 2016. Keoghan was most recently seen in Christopher Nolan’s Dunkirk (2017), and is currently the brand ambassador for Dior.

Mammal was well-received by critics and audiences alike, having won the Panavision Spirit Award at the Santa Barbara International Film Festival. It also received multiple nominations at the Sundance Film Festival, the Irish Film and Television Awards as well as the Dublin Film Critics Circle Awards. With intensely emotional performances and an elliptical screenplay, Daly’s film presents to its viewers a calibrated portrait of emotional loss that surprises at every turn.

As a decidedly local feature film, Road To Your Heart won the hearts and minds of Afrikaners alike and enjoyed critical box office successes. It raked in more than R11 million in gross revenue and was the highest grossing Afrikaans Narrative Feature Film of 2014. The film also dominated the Husigenoot Tempo Awards, sweeping the awards for Afrikaans Movie of the Year, as well as Actor and Actress of the Year.

The filming process took place over 2 weeks, involving 25 people and some 30 sets across 3,500km of breath-taking South African landscapes, sights and sounds. Travelling from Joburg to Cape Town, and through Clarens, Murraysburg and Wilderness, the journey was one that director Jaco Smit could only describe as a “once-in-a-lifetime experience”.

As for the film, critics have praised Smit for having “a fine eye for detail and the ordinary eccentricities that characterise the ordinary Afrikaner” (The Citizen). An alumni from AFDA Cape Town, Smit directed several short films including the award-winning Die Buurtwag (2012) before he made his feature film debut in Road To Your Heart.

The film is co-produced and co-written by Ivan Botha and Donnalee Roberts, who are also its leading co-stars. For them, writing the screenplay was a “literal and symbolic life journey” of love and romance. They acknowledge that they are themselves hopeless romantics who believe that love “is what makes most things worthwhile in life” (Artslink), a theme which pervades through the entire film.

With a mix of comedy, romance and drama, Road To Your Heart is all at once a heartfelt film about a road trip (mis)adventure, a visual feast for the senses, and a labour of love.

Following the film’s success, Botha, Roberts and Smit have collaborated on another popular romantic comedy, Vir Altyd (2016)

Our Loved Ones is Anne Émond’s second directorial feature. It premiered at more than 20 international film festivals with positive reviews, including the Locarno Film Festival and Toronoto International Film Festival. Émond was also awarded the highly coveted Stella Artois Jay Scott Prize in recognition of her emerging talent in the cinema industry.

Our Loved Ones is a film 15 years in its making, one that is tied to an experience very personal to Émond. Through the film, she hopes to treat the issue of suicide in a realistic fashion, containing “a sense of sadness that won’t go away… something that can’t be explained” (Montreal Gazette).

Despite its dark undertones, Émond believes that the film is ultimately about hope and love: “It’s really about what a family carries from one generation to another. In this case, there’s a sort of ‘mal de vivre’ that’s passed on from one generation to another. But there’s a lot of love.” (Montreal Gazette).

Émond auditioned a total of 45 young women to tell her story, and she eventually chose 20-year-old Karelle Tremblay to lead this film. Tremblay was nominated for Actress in a Leading Role at the Canadian Screen Awards for her portrayal of Laurence, a teenage daughter who has a strained relationship with her father.

Her co-star, Maxim Gaudette, is no stranger to the cinema, having recently thrilled audiences with his spine-chilling role as a killer in Polytechnique (2009) and a temperamental young man in Incendies (2010). Gaudette’s understated yet heart-breaking portrayal of eldest son David in this film has won the hearts of many, landing him a nomination for Actor in a Leading Role at the Canadian Screen Awards as well.

With its universal themes, stellar performances and enthralling screenplay, Our Loved Ones proves that up-and-coming Émond is able to punch well above her weight by portraying a sensitive family drama in a realistic yet sympathetic light.

Winner of the Fiuggi Family Festival’s Special Prize at the 67th Venice Film Festival, Maledimiele tells the story of a teenager who desires to disappear from the world by controlling her physical self. The film’s title is derived from the first phase of anorexia “Honeymoon” (“luna di miele”), so named because it is a time when the anorexic feels good. “The slimmer you are, the stronger you feel. It is at that moment that the truth is overturned and the adolescent believes that ‘the others are wrong’”, director Marco Pozzi explains (Sky Italia).

A film teacher and researcher himself, Pozzi spent a year and a half with co-screenwriter Paolo Rota at major care centres for eating disorders to study its effects and consequences. Emphasising that he is more interested in the mental dimension of the disorder, Pozzi aligned the film closely to a medical point of view, especially from its psychological, chemical and nutritional aspects.

The film is set in Milan, also known as the ‘fashion capital of the world’ where imaginary standards are imposed on the human figure. Pozzi however cautions not to tie anorexia solely to fashion. Eating disorders, he found, is a sort of a “protest”, of not wanting to conform to social expectations and impositions. Anorexia is thus always a difficult issue to approach because it is very personal in nature that calls the individual into question.

Taking the lead role is 15-year-old Benedetta Gargari who, despite her young age, immediately convinced Pozzi with her ability to command the viewer’s attention and explore the dimensions of the disorder. Gargari took incredible lengths to prepare for her role, such as volunteering to shed 5 pounds to look the part. In one scene, she even had to gulp down large quantities of biscuits and feign bulimic attacks. Her exceptional performance led her to win the Best Actress award at the Annecy Italian Film Festival 2011.

Boldly realistic yet hauntingly beautiful, Maledimiele presents a fatalistic description of eating disorders and its impact on those around them. The film however provides no easy answers, forcing the viewers instead to come face-to-face with the illness in its cold, barest form.

Randi’s Into Paradiso was inspired by a painting she saw in Piazzo Dante, Italy, in which a group of football players was playing football on one side, while on the other a group of Sri Lanka boys played cricket. Through the film, Randi hoped to re-create that which characterises the immigration experience – a compelled sharing of spaces between people who come from different worlds. And thus, the characters Alfonso and Gayan were born.

Taking the lead role is theatre veteran and Italian film star Imparato, who has delighted audiences in major films such as Il Divo (2008) and Gomorra (2008). Imparato’s comedic portrayal of Alfonso in Into Paradiso earned him Best Actor awards at the Maremetraggio International Short Film Festival as well as the Monte Carlo Comedy Film Festival.

His counterpart, Anthony, is a Sri Lankan actor who shot to fame after his debut feature in Into Paradiso. He has since gone on to act in several other films such as Human Capital (2013) and Una Domenica note (2013).

Even though this was her directorial debut, Randi is not one who sticks to conventional movie-making techniques. An avid visual artist herself, Randi incorporated stop-motion animation and surreal video diorama into the film in order to accentuate its visual comedy. The eccentricity of her directorial style has not gone unnoticed – even her end credits have been praised as “a work of pop art in their own right” (The Hollywood Reporter). Touted by critics as a skilled director with “great talent and inspiration”, newcomer Randi proves to be a strong contender in contemporary Italian cinema.

Into Paradiso clinched Best Film at the Bimbi Belli Festival, and was nominated for multiple awards at the David di Donatello Awards, Italian National Syndicate of Film Journalists.