KimStim Leading the “Blind”; Bring Eskil Vogt’s Debut to Safety

They’re responsible for landing some of the best in unwanted, rejected yet critically acclaimed festival winning titles all during the eleventh hour. As was the case with Ramon Zürcher’s The Strange Little Cat, Denis Côté’s career best in Vic + Flo Saw a Bear and Ben Rivers & Ben Russell’s A Spell to Ward Off the Darkness, they’ve now saved a piece of Norwegian cinema from continually bumping into the wall. Winner of several awards including the Screenwriting Award for World Cinema at Sundance ’14, IndieWIRE reports that Eskil Vogt’s Blind has been picked up for release and will likely find a slot for sometime this year.

Gist: This focuses on Ellen (Ellen Dorrit Pettersen), a woman contending with the loss of vision. In trying to navigate a world without sight, she spends her days attempting to reconstruct the visual world as she once knew it. In an effort to maintain a connection to reality, she begins to write a sexually-charged story, whose fictional characters she can speak through.

Worth Noting: Vogt, who has been Joachim Trier’s co-writer on all three of his films will likely be in Cannes next month for the world preem of Louder than Bombs.

Do We Care?: Ranked among our top New Voices list at Sundance back in ’14, our Jordan M. Smith calls this this complete package a “screenwriting marvel…Vogt analyzes the painful practical challenges of losing one’s sight by playfully reimagining such circumstances as an on screen narrative sandbox in which his leading lady lives out her darkest fantasies. With a stark, steely tone, Vogt toys with our sense of reality and comments on our own morbid obsession with visual beauty all with an elegant anecdotal ease.”