A delicate drama exploring memory and coming of age, Aftersun was inspired by Charlotte Wells’ relationship with her own father. The film premiered at the Cannes Film Festival in 2022, where it won a French Touch Prize of the Jury and later became a festival hit, amassing hundreds of nominations and dozens of awards.
In the late 1990s, eleven-year-old Sophie (Frankie Corio) spends a few days at a Turkish resort with her father Calum (Paul Mescal) after her parents’ divorce. They swim, play pool, make videos, and argue about ice cream. For Sophie, it is a rare opportunity to spend time with her dad, but a different reality starts seeping through their days of fun and entertainment: Calum is struggling with an internal crisis, which Sophie is too young to recognize.
The film unfolds as a chain of memories, to which the grown-up Sophie turns in an attempt to reconstruct the image of her father based on fragments of memory and home videos. In this mosaic, an idyllic summer coexists with a barely perceptible anxiety. Wells delicately builds the rhythm of mood changes: from nonchalance to inner tension, and from relaxation to hidden pain. Showing the simultaneity of these very different states, Aftersun creates a very particular feeling of sadness—a rare and very personal meditation on how our memory can rewrite the past and how hard it is to truly understand the people we love.
A shortened version of the film will be screened due to the exclusion of scenes that are in contravention of Russian law.
Aftersun
Director: Charlotte Wells
UK, USA, 2022. 99 min. 18+