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Sometimes it meant really talking through the intention of what she was saying. But, every so often, she surprised us in the best ways possible with her performance in the film. “I spent six months pretending to rewrite but in actual fact just spellchecking it over and over again,” she said. Aftersun, on the surface at least, follows a thirty-ish father and his 11-year-old daughter on a humdrum package holiday to Turkey. Calum and Sophie spend their days sunbathing and swimming, eating and drinking, little more. What fascinates is how Wells frames the everyday to reveal a subtext of which Sophie herself is only dimly aware.
Film
The response was wholly unexpected, both for what it was and because I had never considered what it might be. Which is a naivete I will only have this once and feel so grateful for. We’d spoken a lot in the edit room about the film’s legibility and how it might connect with audiences, but without any thought to what that meant. I don’t think we ever thought very many people would see the film, which was a reasonable expectation. Newcomer Corio stuns with her incredibly natural performance, and while she’s new to the screen, the young actress quickly adapted to life in front of the camera. Short-form stories are better suited for films because they’re about the tone and provide space to build a world.
Postcard from the edge: Charlotte Wells on Aftersun
Following the end of the service, Princess Charlotte also led her brother out of Westminster Abbey with a guiding hand. The siblings looked so grown up as they followed in the footsteps of their parents, the Prince and Princess of Wales. In honour of Princess Charlotte's 9th birthday on Thursday, here at HELLO! Per the AP, after the group of three bought their tickets — the eighth-largest lottery winner in the history of the United States — Chao sent a photo of the tickets to Saephan and joked, "We're billionaires."
Awards
But that’s the kind of question that will become informed by every viewer’s own life experience. Wells, who has received a DGA nomination for first-time feature directing, crafted an intimate yet ambitious memory film about a young father and his daughter making the most of their shared time together. “Be gentle with me,” she seemed to be saying, but a little under two hours later it was the rest of us that needed support, the audience rising unsteadily to its feet for a two-minute standing ovation. It was like a meteor had smashed in through the roof and landed square in my lap, all glowing embers of grief I didn’t know what to do with.
She then earned a Master of Fine Arts and a Master of Business Administration at the Tisch School of the Arts. She was supported by the BAFTA New York Media Studies Scholarship Program while in school and wrote and directed three short films. In 2018, she was named one of Filmmaker’s 25 New Faces of Independent Film, and in 2020, she became a fellow at the 2020 Sundance Institute Screenwriters and Directors Labs. NPR's Scott Simon speaks with director Charlotte Wells about her new movie, "Aftersun," a story that follows a father and daughter as they remember the last summer vacation they spent together. Calum is a thirty-something father, and even though he had separated from Sophie’s mother, he continued to maintain a healthy relationship.
I was interested in an expression of some truth from my own relationship, and the love that I experienced. It had great freedom, expression, and community, but I also saw another side of that; people on drugs with desperate facial expressions. What at first was a place of liberation could become a place of inescapability. I feel like most people’s memories are based on images, which is why film is a great medium for works about memory. Many of the scenes with adult Sophie show her in a rave-type situation watching her father dance.
Charlotte Wells on Aftersun, The Guardian’s best film of the year: ‘The grief expressed is mine’ - The Guardian
Charlotte Wells on Aftersun, The Guardian’s best film of the year: ‘The grief expressed is mine’.
Posted: Fri, 23 Dec 2022 08:00:00 GMT [source]
The look of concern on the mother’s face, and the tone of the school day’s interactions, give a sense of some unspoken loss hanging over the girl. Each detail tugs at you until finally, after the girl has spent the afternoon alone in the dying light of her father’s apartment, her mother arrives to quietly take her home. “Aftersun” is one of those films that lingers long after you have watched it.
His childhood was not a pleasant one; we can sense that he was neglected. He expressed how, after leaving his hometown, he never felt like he belonged there anymore. Edinburgh was where he grew up, but he could not relate to the people or the place. He prefers living in London and hopes to rent a house there with his business partner, Keith. While he did seem unsure about his business venture, he found comfort in dreaming about having his life together and renting a flat right outside London where Sophie could have her own room and visit him time and again. Even though he was suffering financially, he always tried to conceal his troubles.
Features
As the major awards shows loom, Wells spoke to THR about what the positive reception has been like, what she considers the most pivotal scenes and how she chose the tunes for the movie’s crucial musical moments. Wells was born and raised in Edinburgh, but moved to the US in 2012 to study film at New York University. That lucidity is everywhere in Aftersun, which paints its characters’ interior lives in quiet, telling strokes reminiscent of Moonlight director Barry Jenkins, who served as a producer on the film. Does it speak to an audience hunger for films that aren’t too prescriptive? One thing that struck me was the second we finished screening in Cannes, this young man came up to me and shared his own and his mother’s experience with depression. Many scenes in Aftersun feature little to no dialogue, and that restraint proves essential.
Back in 2021, the young Princess was with her doting mother, Princess Kate, and she was her eyes and ears when she and her brothers were watching the Pageant on the last day of Queen Elizabeth II's Platinum Jubilee Celebrations. While a fictional story, Wells has admitted that parts of her life have crept into the film. It wasn’t popular in Scotland then, so I think it was unusual.
The film then freezes on her as a child waving goodbye to her father. Adult Sophie has paused the video on her home videos from that vacation. I first saw Aftersun in October 2022 at the Chicago International Film Festival. The ending doesn’t have to shout to speak volumes about the fate of the characters and the crippling weight of memories, loss, and mental health issues. One thing I’m still learning is the difference between words on a page that convey a specific sensation and how to transfer that to the screen.
I made Aftersun in a vacuum with my friends and then it reaches people and makes them feel strongly. People want the connection between artist and art to be so strong. It’s funny hearing people describe it as my memory because that it truly is not. The events that were in the script that were closely based on a conversation or an interaction – many of them aren’t in the final film. I think that’s because I am keen to serve the film and not my own past and whatever I’m exorcising with my own past is still the core of the film. And that’s a really easy thing to admit because, as I said, this to me was a form of expression and that is what I was ultimately expressing.
Jenkins, himself a maker of richly vivid, lyrical films that compress present and past, was intimately involved in the process. He estimates that through the edit, he’s seen the film 12 to 15 times. He would come up a lot,” Wells said, brightening with his memory.
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