AFC’s Conversations

Opening Un Certain Regard competition, Icelandic director Rúnar Rúnarsson’s new film is about grief and lies. The young Icelandic actress and singer Elin Hall plays an ambiguous character, torn between the pain of losing her man and the impossibility of revealing him to others... Swedish cinematographer Sophia Olsson shot the film, which is almost entirely shot in Iceland’s capital, and whose iconic locations will undoubtedly evoke memories for lovers of this timeless city. (FR)

Shot over the course of 36 days in Moscow, Petrov’s Flu is a very strange film, which keeps even the most stalwart viewers in its grip and sometimes brings them to the point of malaise. Kirill Serebrennikov’s latest work is a 2.5-hour-long nightmare in a timeless Russia. Vladislav Opelyants, RGC, his faithful cinematographer, just won the 2021 CST Award of the Technical Artist for this film.

With Toni Erdmann, German director Maren Ade was able to make the audience in the Grand Théâtre Lumière laugh for 90 of the 160 minutes of her film. The subject of the film is the existential crisis experienced by a female senior executive sent to work in Bucharest, and we can but applaud the tour de force that ought to see the director and her actors reach the highest levels of the Awards Ceremony on the evening of 22 May. Silke Fischer and Patrick Orth (production designer and cinematographer) discuss this strange Romanian-German “feel good movie”. (FR)