Ego, the first feature film by Finnish director Hanna Bergholm, won the Grand Prix at the Gérardmer International Fantastic Film Festival on Sunday January 30. This horror film tells the story of a 12-year-old gymnast, Tinja (Siiri Solalinna), confronted with the perfectionism of her mother, who dramatizes their daily life on a very followed blog.
Her life changes after the discovery of a strange egg in the forest, which she brings back and hatches under her pillow. The creature that emerges will become both his best friend and a waking nightmare. The film is a reflection on maternal instinct. Ego “is a story about the absence of love that creates monsters”, explained Hanna Bergholm in the notes of intent of her feature film, also presented at the American festival of Sundance.
No less worrying, the children of The Innocents (public and press jury awards) offered a harrowing dive into the magical, but cruel, world of childhood. “I wanted to enter this closed world of childhood to really try to see the world as children, and for the spectators to find their own memories”, Norwegian director Eskil Vogt, one of the rising stars of Nordic auteur cinema, told AFP. He is also the compatriot and screenwriter of Joachim Trier.
At the other end of the age pyramid, it is with a grandmother that the Spanish king of horror Paco Plaza, author of the hit films (Rec), thrills in The Abuela (jury prize): an almost intimate story, that of an elderly bedridden lady (former Brazilian model Vera Valdz) and her granddaughter (Almudena Amor), haunted by the fear of growing old.
This young model has to leave the Parisian fashion shows where she was starting to break through in a hurry to go to her grandmother’s bedside, in a dark Madrid apartment with creaking parquet floors and slamming doors. Faced with this grandmother rendered mute by illness, and the supernatural events that seem to surround her, the young woman will quickly lose her footing, in an atmosphere partly inspired by the Rosemary’s Baby by Roman Polansky.
“I wanted to express this fear of not recognizing an aging family member”, Paco Plaza told AFP. Anxiety born after seeing his own aunt struck down by Alzheimer’s disease: “We see the person, but in his eyes we see that he is no longer there. It is like a possession, of which the demon would be old age”, he continues.
Questions of inheritance which also feeds samhain (ex aequo jury prize), which depicts a young Irishwoman, Char, harassed in high school, living with her mother Angela, plagued by depression. In a suburb of Dublin in the midst of preparations for Halloween (samhain is the Celtic name), Angela’s behavior becomes more and more mysterious and violent…
Evil powers borrowed from Celtic folklore, in which the director Kate Dolan grew up, or fruit of the tortured imagination of a teenager confronted with the depression of her mother? The film does not settle. “In my family, there are stories of mental illness. And it always remains a part of you, even when you want to escape from it”, confides the director, for whom this is the first feature film, to AFP. “The film also tries to say that you have to accept it, confront it and then you can survive”.