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It stars beloved Irish actor Paul Mescal as a young father, Calum, while breakout actress Frankie Corio portrays his 11-year-old daughter, Sophie. The driving force behind the film was my desire to represent that kind of father. At the same time, it presented challenges because people are accustomed to seeing the deadbeat dad onscreen, and that’s what they want to see.
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But yes, tai chi and raving are coping mechanisms for different sides of Calum. Making a feature film, though, meant toiling over every detail, carefully sculpting the film’s precise but organic flow. “I was always preoccupied with keeping a record of things visually,” Wells said, describing how she shot friends and parties, including a last-day-of-school celebration before reluctantly changing schools. Romanski and Jenkins signed on to produce through Pastel, their production company formed with the intention of enabling young directors similar to how Plan B helped them make Moonlight. But I’d also like them to come away knowing that memory is a very powerful thing, and it’s warm. For Calum, it’s something he will never get to look forward to or dread again, because he’s now forever frozen in his early 30s.
The Unreliable Nature Of Memory
The distance between the father and the daughter is encapsulated in a rave party where adult Sophie catches glimpses of her father. She walks up to him, but she cannot see him in his entirety. She had a lot to say, indefinite reasons to be angry about, and the aching desire to hold onto her father a little longer. Sophie stood in the dark room, unable to grab hold of her father as she watched him fall.
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They were both on set and we see — as the camera pans back to Calum in the shot — at the end of the scene, Frankie would get up from the bed and leave the room with Paul together. They would remain outside the room together and we would reset. Paul had to shift from being in that internal space that allowed him to play that intense scene, back to playfully hanging out with Frankie. To some degree, that reflects what that character had to do in that moment, so it all played into itself. Indeed, Wells’ three short films and “Aftersun” all feature the same precise calibration of tone and internal meanings. Her characters struggle to express their frustrations in a world that boxes them in.
This seems, in my opinion, to act as a way to show the fading nature of Sophie’s memory of her father. When I originally saw Aftersun in October, I was convinced that the film clearly reveals that Calum died after the vacation. Rewatching the film, it became apparent that my memory of the ending has become slightly distorted.
Bafta nominee Charlotte Wells on the story behind Aftersun and casting Paul Mescal - The Telegraph
Bafta nominee Charlotte Wells on the story behind Aftersun and casting Paul Mescal.
Posted: Fri, 17 Feb 2023 08:00:00 GMT [source]
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The time they spend on this holiday is very precious to them. Calum takes Sophie on a trip to a Turkish budget resort, where Calum struggles with feelings of depression. The adult Sophie is trying to remember her father by looking back on this holiday, and piece together the memories she has with the help of the videos she and her father took on vacation. Aftersun, now in select theaters and streaming later this year on Mubi, certainly isn’t told in a straightforward manner.
She hates that song, she wouldn’t rehearse it, and I had to sing it to try and encourage her to come onstage for the shot. When I saw Aftersun at the Telluride Film Festival, it was the first nice experience I had watching — and it was very clear that there was no need to watch it, perhaps ever again. (Laughs.) I did do a director’s commentary, which was completely surreal, but I don’t count that as watching so much as reliving what was happening beyond the frame. I’ve been speaking about the film so much that it strangely starts to feel like some abstraction that isn’t real.
He said that he was first diagnosed in 2016, and his most recent chemotherapy treatment was just one week prior, perThe Oregonian. For Sophie, the tapes are anchor points for her to remember memories. The things she sees in the tapes are a combination of things remembered and imagined. We are a cultural charity, a National Lottery funding distributor, and the UK’s lead organisation for film and the moving image. Here was the uncommonly mature debut of a filmmaker of masterful control and deep wells of empathy.
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She then earned a Master of Fine Arts and a Master of Business Administration at the Tisch School of the Arts. She was supported by the BAFTA New York Media Studies Scholarship Program while in school and wrote and directed three short films. In 2018, she was named one of Filmmaker’s 25 New Faces of Independent Film, and in 2020, she became a fellow at the 2020 Sundance Institute Screenwriters and Directors Labs. NPR's Scott Simon speaks with director Charlotte Wells about her new movie, "Aftersun," a story that follows a father and daughter as they remember the last summer vacation they spent together. Calum is a thirty-something father, and even though he had separated from Sophie’s mother, he continued to maintain a healthy relationship.
The tapes prompted reflection about how memory and film intertwine. Wells has sometimes spoken obliquely about the personal roots of Aftersun, describing it as “emotionally autobiographical”. But many details of the film have profound connections with her life.
It should come as no surprise, then, that “Aftersun” was shepherded along by Pastel, the production company co-founded by “Moonlight” director Barry Jenkins and his longtime producing partner Adele Romanski. It was Romanski who pushed her old film school pal Jenkins to get cracking on “Moonlight” after years of hesitation, and she found herself in a similar position when she first encountered Wells in 2017. As a metaphor for the difficulty of giving vent to painful emotions, a spout clogged with leaves is almost too apt.
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