Toronto Film ‘Not a Word’ Debuts Trailer, Director Hanna Slak Talks Truth of Mahler’s 5th Symphony: ‘You Have to Face the Darkness’ (EXCLUSIVE)
29.08.2023 - 09:05
/ variety.com
Leo Barraclough International Features Editor “Not a Word,” which is being sold by international sales agency Beta Cinema, will have its world premiere at the Toronto Film Festival in the competitive Platform section. Variety speaks to the film’s writer-director, Hanna Slak, and debuts its trailer. “Not a Word” tells the story of a relationship crisis between a parent and her teenage son.
Maren Eggert, who won the best acting award at the Berlin Film Festival for “I’m Your Man,” plays an ambitious orchestra conductor, Nina. Jona Levin Nicolai (“The Net,” Netflix’s “The Grimm Reality”) plays her moody son, Lars. Following the death of a girl at Lars’ school, the boy has a mysterious accident, but refuses to talk about it.
Nina decides to take a break from city life and together they head to their vacation home on an island on the rugged Atlantic coast. As a storm gathers, their brittle relationship, wreathed in silence, is pushed to breaking point. In the film’s end credits, Slak includes a dedication to her mother, and she confirms that she has drawn on her own relationships – both with her mother and her own relationship with her children – when crafting the film.
“It’s very much a film that focuses on a single relationship,” she says. “It focuses on the relationship between a mother and a child, a son, but at the same time, it explores different nuances and the depth of this relationship. There is a lot of me in the mother; there’s a lot of me in the child.
There is my mother in the mother; there’s my mother in the child. There are mothers that I know and children that I know in all the characters.” She comes from a family of artists, she explains: both her parents were filmmakers. “My mother especially has had a huge
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