2013 Cannes Film Festival Predictions: Urszula Antoniak’s Nude Area

#59. Urszula Antoniak’s Nude Area

Gist: A project that’s sounds typically Antoniakian (right down to the title) – albeit less suffocating and more optimistic and spirited than usual – Nude Area sets out to present a hypnotic portrait of female seduction featuring Naomi, a fifteen year-old Dutch girl from South-Amsterdam as she develops a crush on a beautiful Arabic girl of the same age living in the poor quarters of Amsterdam West. During one magical summer in Amsterdam, the two girls play an emotional chess game of love, seduction and attraction.

Prediction: This could go either Un Certain Regard or Fortnight, the latter being where her previous film – an ugly, sterile, and empty provocation known as Code Blue – played in 2011. If she’s cooled it on the angry naked red paint metaphors and explicit, abusive sex scenes, I see no reason why this wouldn’t get the ‘upgrade’ into the Official Selection. Then again, if we’ve learned anything from the curious case of Lou Ye, she could also just leave all that in there and still get a promotion anyway.