Directors’ Fortnight: Thomas Salvador’s ‘The Mountain’ Wins SACD Prize

In the second major prize announcement by a Directors’ Fortnight lover, “The Mountain” (“La Montagne”), from rising French auteur Thomas Salvador, has gained the SACD Prize, awarded by France’s Writers’ Guild for the most effective French-language movie in the part.

The next attribute of the French actor-director after 2017’s promising “Vincent,” selected for San Sebastian’s prestige New Administrators area, ”The Mountain” is bought internationally by Le Pacte which will also take care of distribution in France.

From a screenplay written by Salvador and Naila Guiguet, which was chosen for Critics’ Weeks’ Future Techniques 2020, “The Mountain” turns on Pierre, 40, performed by Salvador, who would make a profits pitch for his company’s robotic arm in Chamonix, the money of the French Alps.

When his colleagues return to Paris, he stays on, pitching a tent just below the Aiguille du Midi cable auto station, a amazing pinnacle at 12,600 ft, in the lap of Mont Blanc. There he strikes up a friendship with the head of the station’s restaurant (Louise Bourgoin) as a mysterious glow glitters in the deep mountains – and the movie in its last third will make a extraordinary tonal shift into the supernatural.

Small clarification is provided to the finale, as minimal was created as to why Vincent, in Salvador’s debut, acquires tremendous-human powers  when in get hold of with water.

Salvador  told Le Film Français in an job interview that Pierre is “searching for what he really dreams in everyday living and to strike a equilibrium involving that and his relationship with other persons.”

“Prizing ‘The Mountain,’ we are prizing the prodigious audacity and radiant simplicity of generous filmmaking. The spectacular and personal ambition of the movie, its fragile composing and its stylistic ambition get us on a memorable journey,” reported SACD’s Delphine Gleize, a author-director, incorporating that the award was the “consecration of a author, a director who also acts, and of an auteur.”

Previous winners of SACD’s Directors’ Fortnight prize choose is numerous of France’s foremost administrators, both nicely proven and up-and-coming, these kinds of as Rebecca Zlotowski (“An Simple Girl,” 2019), Claire Denis (“Let the Sunshine In,” 2017) Philippe Garrel (“Lover for a Working day,” 2017) and and Arnaud Desplechin (“My Golden Days,” 2015). 

Canada’s Xavier Dolan gained for his breakthrough debut, “I Killed My Mom,” again in 2009.