OFFICIAL SELECTION Directors’ Fortnight, Cannes Film Festival 2018

 

Cannes film festival regular Jamie Rosales (Beautiful Youth) returns with this bold and utterly absorbing portrait of a young painter who travels to the Catalan countryside after the death of her mother.

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Petra (Bárbara Lennie) an artist in her 20s, arrives to take up a residency in the workshops of Jaume, a sculptor of grand-scale commissions. Jaume’s Catalan estate encompasses forest lands and a magnificent home. Invited to dinner by the great man’s wife Marisa, Petra speaks of art as a path to the truth. Marisa, it transpires, has reason to be sceptical about such idealism: the truth Petra seeks is the identity of her father, and she has reason to believe he might be Jaume.

The search for identity and dangers of seeking revenge runs through this beautifully crafted film. Rosales expertly weaves together multiple narrative threads to craft a richly complex and unpredictable melodrama of Greek tragedy proportions. Performances are uniformly excellent, particularly Bárbara Lennie, who memorably featured recently in Asghar Farhadi’s Everybody Knows.