Newsletter 
Short movies: Wonder moms
Nuclear family, Faustine Crespy, Belgium
18-year-old Jules reluctantly spends his holidays in the naturist campsite of his childhood. He is torn between his attraction for the beautiful Karim, a seasonal worker on the textile beach, and dealing with his depressed mother Adèle, who refuses to let him grow up.
To the Dusty Sea, Héloïse Ferlay, 2020, France, 12’
Malo and Zoe are trying their best to catch their absent-minded mother’s elusive eye.
https://hiff.fi/en/elokuvat/happy-bubble-wonder-moms/
Two of us, Filippo Meneghetti, 2019, 1h39
“France’s Oscar submission is a secretive love story with shades of Amour.”
David Ehrlich, The Guardian
“Filippo Meneghetti, a first-time but remarkably assured filmmaker, gives Two of Us a dreamlike realism, letting the score go ragged in its tensest moments and swooping in artfully on aching closeups and empty spaces. More than any machinations in the script, it’s the profound intimacy he creates for his two main characters — and the lovely, indelible way both actresses color inside those lines — that lingers after the last poignant fadeout.”
Leah Greenblatt, Entertainment Weekly
https://hiff.fi/elokuvat/riemukupla-yhdessa/
Slalom (2020)
Charlène Favier
Kesto: 92 min
“Shot with the kineticism of bodies in motion, the sensitivity of an early Céline Sciamma film, and the foreboding seductiveness of a hidden fantasy world in which dreams and danger seem to go hand-in-hand (one stunner of a scene finds Fred and Lyz dangling their legs out of a gondola that’s caught in the clouds), Slalom perverts the arc of the average sports movie by asking us to root against Lyz’s success. The more time Fred spends with her, the better she gets; the better she gets, the more time she has to spend with Fred. Following one of cinema’s most nauseating handjobs, Lyz even moves in with Fred and his oblivious girlfriend, an invitation of such off-the-charts creepiness that it forces us to stop complicating the guy’s psychology.”
David Ehrlich, IndieWire
https://hiff.fi/elokuvat/slalom/