In any given year, a film such as Venice Film Fest’s Marianna Brennand’s Manas or Berlinale Silver Bear winning The Blue Trail by Gabriel Mascaro would have repped the nation of Brazil for the Best Intl. Feature Film but with NEON backing the project and two major Palme awards for Best Actor and Best Director meant that Kleber Mendonça Filho‘s The Secret Agent was the favorite. With Joachim Trier’s Sentimental Value, Park Chan-wook’s No Other Choice and to be probably named by France in Jafar Panahi’s It Was Just an Accident, NEON almost has a lock on the category. We see Shih-Ching Tsou’s Left-Handed Girl (Netflix), and recent Silver Lion winner Kaouther Ben Hania (The Voice of Hind Rajab) in the current mix. And look for NEON to put their weight behind Wagner Moura for Best Actor categories not unlike how SPC backed Fernanda Torres in I’m Still Here.
Our ★★★★ star review our Nicholas Bell writes that the film “mines through the rubble of the past, reconstructing the beauty and terror of a time long gone but still haunting the present.”
