OPEN CALLS: Green Film Lab - Budapest, TFL Co-Production Fund & TFL Next - Feature Film
An isolated island cloaked in bush contaminated by a lethal virus. One small chunk of it, stripped of plant life, is where Ilda (14) lives with her parents. Abel toils on his fish farm, Marilyn suffers from depression; neither notice their daughter is growing up. Restless and lonely, Ilda’s wants to discover the world. But her fear of the virus is like a prison wall, she can go nowhere. One day she discovers a boy hiding in the bush. Filthy and wild, he gives her an anti-dote guaranteeing protection from the virus and persuades her to follow him into the undergrowth. Ilda embarks on a voyage through the thick, dark, forbidden foliage to discover innocent sensuality and friendship. In a burnt ruin they make plans to run away together. In her emotionally sterile home environment, Ilda starts to notice changes: her mother refusing to take her pills, her father’s increasing violence. One night she sees her mother enter the burnt ruin. Hidden, she watches as she lays immaculate white sheets on two tiny cot beds blackened by fire. Ilda realizes there was once another life on the island, another man...
Ilda grows up in an environment of fear and forbidding. Cut off from outside influences her reality is reduced to a few sterile acres of land. She seeks to understand the world around her, but with only her parents’ heavy silences, meaningful looks and body language to go on, doubt and uncertainty hover. Seen through Ilda’s eyes the film will take us through her discovery of another world, the one her parents have been hiding from her. Ilda’s obscurantism and isolation are enhanced by the film’s strongly stylized visual aspect: the impossible bareness of the land, the exageratedly functional and empty buildings, the desaturated colours... Ilda discovers “life” on the other side of the fence, in the bush. All in this entangled undergrowth is of a sensuous and sensual nature. As the girl and boy’s relationship progresses, visually the bush evolves to a magical, unreal forest with towering trees and mysterious lighting.
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