Latest news with #Lidia
Yahoo
24-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Chilean Drama ‘The Mysterious Gaze Of The Flamingo' Wins Top Un Certain Regard Prize — Cannes
Chilean Drama The Mysterious Gaze of the Flamingo by Diego Céspedes won the main Un Certain Regard Prize this evening in Cannes. Set in 1982, the film follows eleven-year-old Lidia lives with her beloved queer family in a desert mining town in northern Chile. As an unknown and deadly disease begins to spread, legend has it that it is transmitted between two men, through a simple glance, when they fall in love. While people are accusing her family, Lidia must find out whether this myth is real or not. More from Deadline 'Honey Don't!' Review: Margaret Qualley Stars As A Gutsy Private Eye In Ethan Coen's Messy Comic Noir - Cannes Film Festival 'Imago' Director Déni Oumar Pitsaev On Winning Two Prizes In Cannes: "I Didn't Expect It At All" Palm Dog: 'The Love That Remains', 'Sirât', 'Pillion' And 'Amores Perros' Honored - Cannes Film Festival A Poet, by Colombian filmmaker Simón Mesa Soto, won the Jury Prize. The film is Soto's second feature, and it follows Oscar Restrepo, whose obsession with poetry brought him no glory. Aging and erratic, he has succumbed to the cliché of the poet in the shadows. Meeting Yurlady, a teenage girl from humble roots, and helping her cultivate her talent brings some light to his days, but dragging her into the world of poets may not be the way. Best Screenplay went to Pillion, the debut feature from British filmmaker Harry Lighton. The film stars Harry Melling as a timid young gay man named Colin who comes into his sexuality when a biker named Ray (Alexander Skarsgård) takes him on as his sexual submissive. Best Director went to Palestinian filmmakers Tarzan and Arab Nasser for Once Upon a Time in Gaza while the Performance Awards went to Cléo Diara for I Only Rest in the Storm and Frank Dillane for the Harris Dickinson-directed Urchin. This year's jury was presided over by UK director, screenwriter, and cinematographer Molly Manning Walker, who was joined by French-Swiss director and screenwriter Louise Courvoisier, Croatian director of the International Film Festival Rotterdam Vanja Kaludjercic, Italian director, producer, and screenwriter Roberto Minervini, and Argentinian actor Nahuel Pérez Biscayart. Best of Deadline 'Poker Face' Season 2 Guest Stars: From Katie Holmes To Simon Hellberg Everything We Know About Amazon's 'Verity' Movie So Far Everything We Know About 'The Testaments,' Sequel Series To 'The Handmaid's Tale' So Far
Yahoo
19-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
‘The Chronology of Water' Review: Kristen Stewart Makes a Boldly Assured Directing Debut, Starring a Transformative Imogen Poots
There's a beguiling dichotomy in Kristen Stewart's accomplished first feature as writer-director — between the dreamlike haze and fragmentation of memory and the raw wound of trauma so vivid it will always be with you. Adapted from the influential 2011 memoir by Lidia Yuknavitch, The Chronology of Water is challenging material, an unflinching account of childhood sexual abuse followed by years of vanishing — into addiction, sexual experimentation and self-destruction before the author found her voice by channeling her pain into writing. Stewart also appears to have found her voice, announcing the seriousness of her intentions not with auteurist self-importance but with unimpeachable commitment to honoring her subject's story. More from The Hollywood Reporter Cannes: 'Corsage' Director Marie Kreutzer Wins Investors Circle Prize for 'Gentle Monster' Strong Festival, Soft Market at Cannes Enters Final Stretch Chie Hayakawa on Revisiting the Pain and Wonder of Childhood in Cannes Film 'Renoir' That subject, Lidia, played by Imogen Poots in a daring high-wire act, represents not just herself and her fellow-survivor sister Claudia (Thora Birch) but countless women shamed into silence or damaged beyond repair by violations of their bodies. It's a visceral, densely textured film, shot on grainy 16mm and splashed with disorienting color washes and lens flare and light that deliberately obscures as much as it illuminates. It cuts deep even while washing over you with soothing images of water, as the title suggests. 'Come in. The water will hold you,' says Lidia at the end, which is exactly what the movie invites us to do, in ways that may be triggering, but perhaps also cathartic. Dispensing with exposition, establishing shots and specific time indicators, and shooting much of the movie in intimate closeup, Stewart shapes The Chronology of Water into a scrappy collage, almost like pictures pasted into a journal. The narrative is ragged and nonlinear but rendered as stream-of-consciousness poetry in Olivia Neergaard-Holm's nervy and yet somehow liquid edit. Stewart and Poots thrust us into the molten core of Lidia's experience, forcing us — with emotional candor rather than manipulation — to know her pain. While the approach is entirely different, more than once I was reminded of Su Friedrich's landmark 1990 experimental memoir film Sink or Swim, which reflects in a more detached but no less personal way on a young girl's upbringing and her experience of emotional and physical abuse from an aloof, hard-to-please father. Lidia's father, Mike (Michael Epp), is the kind of firm-jawed, handsome man who looks like he just stepped out of a Brylcreem commercial. But his cruelty is on full display when he sits her down to read her college acceptance letters and rejects the half or three-quarter scholarship offers, all but gloating over her failure to secure a full ride. 'If they don't want you then you don't belong there,' he sneers. In her depiction of his abuse, Stewart shows sound judgment and maturity, keeping the sexual violence almost entirely off-camera. But it's shocking, nonetheless. In one scene, the family drives to the woods to cut down a Christmas tree. The young Lidia (Anna Wittowsky) waits in the car with her mother, Dorothy (Susannah Flood), who is absent even when she's present and has perfected the art of not seeing. Mike instructs teenage Claudia (Marlena Sniega) to grab the saw and go with him. They come back to the car in silence, without a tree, and even with the fuzzy perception of a child, Lidia seems to intuit what took place from the deadened look in her sister's eyes. When she's older, Mike warns Lidia about the disgusting things college boys will want to do to her. Corey C. Waters' camera stays on Lidia through the whole conversation, keeping Mike outside the frame. But the words and sounds we hear make it clear that he's touching her inappropriately, probably doing exactly what he says those imagined college boys will do, but in Mike's case, he acts with entitlement. Stewart makes extensive use of voiceover narration, which embraces the film's literary roots while also endowing it with first-person immediacy. Lidia's words guide us from her childhood in 1970s San Francisco through her escape from home via competitive swimming; the death of her Olympics dream when drugs and alcohol got her kicked out of a program; the flailing sexual excesses of her college years, flipping between men and women, slugging vodka from a flask that's always with her and snorting endless lines of blow. 'My own drugs. My own sex. My own friends. My own freedom,' she intones like a mantra, trying to convince herself those are the keys to moving forward. Long after Lidia's swimming career fizzles, water remains inextricably linked for her with memory. Water is also where she can imagine herself in whatever altered state she believes will quiet her tormented mind — oblivion, erasure, salvation, purification, transformation, or just simply being able to feel a sense of self, which remains elusive. 'In water, like in books, you can leave your life,' she says at one point. Later, when she has published her first collection of stories and won an award from Poets & Writers Magazine, she's invited to give a public reading. The piece she chooses begins with a starter's call at a race: 'Swimmers, on your marks.' She goes on to describe wanting to emerge from the chlorinated water like something amphibious, without gender. But her tenuous self-confidence leaves her shaken, unable to absorb the compliments of organizers or audience, or to react to the interest of a publisher in seeing more of her work. Her relationships run from saddening to toxic. Still trying to shut out the sound of her father's voice, she allows herself to be charmed by gentle-natured, guitar-strumming folkie Phillip (Earl Cave, son of the musician Nick Cave), confessing that she treated him badly and wishes she could go back and apologize. She's put off by his sweetness, his refusal to respond to her meanness and his unfailing encouragement, expressing pride in her tiniest recovery wins. Even if Phillip's niceness chafes, she asks him to marry her, which they do in a sweet, goofy ceremony on a beach. But when she gets pregnant, she goes to stay with Claudia, both sisters still carrying around the dead weight of their childhood legacy. The tragedy that results from that pregnancy yields a return to the same beach with Phillip in a funny-sad scene that lurches from awkwardness to wrenching loss. In the wake of Phillip, Lidia takes up with the opposite of nice, Devin (Tom Sturridge), a cocky fuckboy who steers her into heavier drug use and slams her against walls in sex that seems more punishing than pleasurable, which is maybe what she thinks she needs. A relationship with a photographer played by Sonic Youth's Kim Gordon gives her a taste of BDSM, her arms bound to her torso while she's spanked hard with a paddle. No matter how messed up Lidia gets, writing remains her life raft. A friend gets her into a creative writing workshop in Oregon with One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest author Ken Kesey. He's played in a lovely turn by Jim Belushi as a rambling acid head, whose thorny charms give the movie a welcome lift. The group works with Kesey on his collaborative novel Caverns, and he's quick to spot Lidia's talent, his mentorship helping to steer her in the right direction. But it's when she starts teaching a writing class that hope and purpose and some kind of stability finally appear within reach. Unsurprisingly, Stewart gets fine work from her actors, even those who appear only in a few fragments. Cave has the most fully developed secondary character and the most screen time, and he brings aching sensitivity to the kind of naïve young man who believes he can fix a broken person. Birch also has strong moments, the misplaced guilt showing on her face over leaving years earlier to save herself and abandoning Lidia to their father. Inviting Lidia into her home and caring for her while she's pregnant seems like the older sister's way of atoning. But Poots is the transfixing fulcrum around which the entire cloudy but still clear-eyed movie spins. Stripped to the bone and flayed by her ugly experiences, both during and for years after, Lidia is emotionally naked, unable even to ask for or accept help. For the longest time she appears to believe she's a void, equipped solely to be that damaged girl from her childhood. It's a remarkable performance. The film's running time stretched by almost 40 minutes between the first program details on the Cannes schedule and the premiere, and it must be said that its sheer intensity often becomes draining, to the point where you wonder who its audience will be. Further tinkering would help and appears a given, since it was rushed to Cannes pretty much straight from the lab. But whatever its future, it seems clear that Stewart has made exactly the movie she wanted to make, establishing a visceral connection with her subject and never letting go. Best of The Hollywood Reporter 'The Goonies' Cast, Then and Now "A Nutless Monkey Could Do Your Job": From Abusive to Angst-Ridden, 16 Memorable Studio Exec Portrayals in Film and TV The 10 Best Baseball Movies of All Time, Ranked
Time Out
17-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Time Out
The Chronology of Water
Kristen Stewart reveals a deft directorial hand and a distinct, languid, echoing style in her vividly made, emotionally visceral exploration of the life and times of American novelist Lidia Yuknavitch. Filmed on 16mm, split into five literary-style chapters across Lidia's life and matching the prose of the memoir it's adapted from, The Chronology of Water is a story of trauma, resilience, the dispelling of female shame, and gynephilic fascination. Yuknavitch is a woman who, by anyone's definition, has had more than her fair share of suffering. In her 2011 memoir, she recounts an upbringing in '80s Florida by a complicit mother and a sexually abusive father who continually raped both her and her older sister. She grows up to be a near-champion swimmer, but her past won't leave her alone. Lidia – played by Imogen Poots as a straw-haired whirlwind who barrels into adult life with a vengeful desperation for freedom and a self-destructive desire for sensation – is a force of nature. She develops substance abuse problems, flunks out of college, gets pregnant, suffers a devastating stillbirth; she flits between relationships with men and women, using sex and drugs to fill the void. And, most importantly, she writes her heart out, growing a career in the literary world both because – and in spite of – the whirling trauma of her memories. Eventually, she finds some hard-won stability, through her writing most of all. All of these experiences are rendered by Stewart in patchwork-quilt style recollection; she uses discordant sound design and jumps between time and place at speed, aided by Poots' own alternately poetic and hard-edged voiceover. Water and wetness remain the central visual and thematic metaphor of the film throughout; not only because of the sexual inference or the salvation of the swimming pool for our protagonist. Stewart shows us how rivulets of memories flow into one another, pool in the crevasses and gullies of the mind and get stuck there; gush or roar with abrupt power. It isn't always easy viewing, but neither is it an endurance test Stewart's film lingers in the discomfort of a charged moment at the kitchen sink, or a seemingly innocuous soft paternal voice. Michael Epp is chilling as the clean-cut, bespectacled suburban dad with monstrous intent beneath his calm exterior, while Thora Birch, as Lidia's beleaguered older sister, has heartbreaking gravitas. But it's Poots who carries the story, giving heart and soul to a performance of a woman who cannot help but careen her way through life like a bull in a china shop. Given its tough subject matter, The Chronology of Water isn't always easy viewing. But neither is it an endurance test. The film does have its weaknesses – it's perhaps a bit overlong and risks repetition at times; it can become too caught up in its own imagery of blood and water and sweat. But Stewart is trying to visualise what Yuknavitch's writing explores, which is in part that what's between her legs has unfortunately been the great wound of her life. This 'pink muscle' that has been at the heart of her worst experiences of abuse and trauma. You could accuse that of being rote feminist anatomical chat; but The Chronology of Water deconstructs how women's bodies remain war zones, too often contested and battered and shamed. It tells us how trauma begets more trauma, and the painful, courageous process of turning it into art.
Yahoo
16-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Cannes Hidden Gem: ‘The Mysterious Gaze of the Flamingo' Is a Modern Western About Family (Exclusive Clip)
Is love a danger, or will it save the day? Chilean writer-director Diego Céspedes explores that question and the theme of family and community as a refuge in his feature debut The Mysterious Gaze of the Flamingo, which world premieres in Cannes' Un Certain Regard section on Thursday. It tells the story of Lidia, 11, 'who grows up in a loving queer family pushed to the edge of an unwelcoming dusty mining town,' according to a synopsis. 'They are blamed for a mysterious illness that's starting to spread – said to be passed through a single gaze, when one man falls in love with another.' More from The Hollywood Reporter Cannes Fest Draws Unusually High Number of Emmy Hopefuls Entertainment Squad Takes 'Walter, Grace & The Submarine' for North America (Exclusive) Kristen Stewart Wants to "Crash and Burn" in Cannes: "We Barely Finished This Movie" Check out an exclusive clip for the movie, produced by Quijote Films in Chile and Les Valseurs in France, with sales being handled by Charades, here. The modern western, starring Tamara Cortés, Matías Catalán, and Paula Dinamarca, may be set in the Chilean desert in the 1980s, well before the 29-year-old was born. But the queer director knows the challenges his characters face, including violence, fear and hatred, from his family's experience. 'My family comes from the suburbs of Chile's capital, Santiago, and they rented this little hairdresser salon and hired gay people to cut hair. At that time, it was just gay people cutting hair,' he tells THR. 'My mother was very close to them, and all of them died of AIDS. And I remember that my mother didn't have much information about it. We just heard that it was a very dangerous thing that can be transmitted very easily. It was just scary.' That is part of the context in which Céspedes created his story. 'I was also inspired by real people and how dissidents and transgender people, when they are abandoned by society, create communities and families,' he explains. 'That is special for me and the core of the film, the creation of a real family that is not sharing blood.' Finding Lidia took a year of auditions before the creative team hit the jackpot with Cortés. 'It was her first time around trans women and such a diverse group,' the director recalls. 'But when we put them together, she was very comfortable and very natural. And she has this mix of an adult attitude and also this kind of humor.' The idea that a gaze could transmit AIDS is not one Céspedes ever heard anyone suggest. 'It's a total creation, but in real life, I have heard very similar things,' he says before sharing thoughts fit for the post-truth world. 'There was ignorance at that time, and even now. When you don't have access to information, you create explanations, because us human beings need an explanation for everything. So, I thought that in this fictional town, what they think about the disease can be something that does not confront reality. We're having sex between men, and that's the main way of transmission. But why would we say that, if we can create another explanation that fits our way of seeing life?' In that sense, The Mysterious Gaze of the Flamingo is a plea to face reality and others. In fact, the need for being open to encountering people who are different is a core message that Céspedes feels is very timely. 'We grow up in a generation where people are taking very hard positions on who's the bad one and who's the good one, but I think we are missing that conversation and that looking each other in the eye.' Diego Céspedes Is the filmmaker optimistic that even in a divided world, humans can build real connections? 'That's a possibility, even if we don't see it too much in our modern society,' he tells THR. 'As human beings, we can talk, and we can find agreement when we look each other in the eye. We need to talk more.' Best of The Hollywood Reporter 'The Goonies' Cast, Then and Now "A Nutless Monkey Could Do Your Job": From Abusive to Angst-Ridden, 16 Memorable Studio Exec Portrayals in Film and TV The 10 Best Baseball Movies of All Time, Ranked
Yahoo
16-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Cannes to premiere Kristen Stewart's directorial debut based on Oregon author's memoir
PORTLAND, Ore. () — Kristen Stewart's directorial debut, based on an Oregon author's acclaimed memoir, will premiere at Festival De Cannes later this week. the Academy-Award-nominated actress is slated to headline , alongside musician Kim Gordon, as part of the international film festival on Friday. Both the organization and its annual gala aim to boost gender equality in the film industry. The event will also serve as Stewart's opportunity to discuss 'The Chronology of Water' just ahead of its debut. These are the 50 best donut shops in the US, and 2 are in Oregon, according to Yelp The movie centers on Lidia Yuknavitch's autobiographical book of the same name. The memoir follows the swimmer's journey from Texas to the Pacific Northwest 'to escape an abusive father and an alcoholic, suicidal mother,' according to Hawthorne Books — the Portland-based company that published the memoir. 'After losing her scholarship to drugs and alcohol, Lidia moves to Eugene and enrolls in the University of Oregon, where she is accepted by Ken Kesey to become one of thirteen graduate students who collaboratively write the novel Caverns with him,' Hawthorne Books . 'Drugs and alcohol continue to flow along with bisexual promiscuity and the discovery of S&M helps ease Lidia's demons.' The company said the book goes on to explain how Yuknavitch's career, as well as her husband and son, have replaced 'the earlier chaos that was her life.' In 2012, the memoir earned the Oregon Book Award for Readers' Choice. It is now getting the Cannes treatment, with the new film that will star Imogen Poots of 'Green Room.' Portland Fire & Rescue: Illegal burning letters are a fraud First-time director she traveled to Portland to ask for Yuknavitch's permission to produce a movie based on her work. She later struggled to get funding for the project, but was ultimately able to film it in Latvia and Malta in less than two months. Previous Cannes features, like 'Parasite' and 'Anora,' have gone on to win the Academy Award for Best Picture. Copyright 2025 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
