Four European documentaries are selected for Cannes ACID 2022, three of which will be presented as world premieres.
In Spanish filmmaker Ainara Vera’s French-Greenlandic co-production Polaris, the radically different lives of two estranged sisters finally begin to converge. After overcoming her painful childhood in France, 36-year-old Hayat has managed to become an expert skipper in the Arctic, her biggest passion to navigate her vessel between icebergs and spot whales. Meanwhile her 28-year-old sister Leila tries to integrate into society after coming out of jail in France. They have maintained independent lives until a year ago – when Leila became pregnant. ‘Polaris explores the inner battle that we all have to undertake to find a balance between the light and the darkness and how the beauty of nature can help us,’ read the film notes.
Revered French doccer Denis Gheerbrant is also selected for Cannes ACID with La Colline (The Hill), co-directed by Lina Tsrimova. The film is set around a large waste dump in Kyrgyzstan which the local population has to live and deal with on a daily basis.
Also world-premiering is French director Fanny Molin’s Atlantic Bar about life inside a local pub in Arles threatened with closure. When raising finance for the film in 2021, Molin described her film as “about the hopes and dreams of bar regulars I’m following since three years. Today we need to tell their stories.”
The fourth doc in Cannes ACID is Marusya Syroechkovskaya’s How To Save A Dead Friend which debuted to acclaim at the recent Visions du Réel. Edited from countless home movies, the film not only shows the descent of Syroechkovskaya’s best friend Kimi into drug-induced depression and death, but indirectly portrays a whole generation growing up – but often not growing old – in Putin’s Russia.
The film received a Special Mention after its world-premiere in Visions du Réel International Competition.
