OPEN CALLS: Green Film Lab - Budapest, TFL Co-Production Fund & TFL Next - Feature Film
Projects
Porcelain Girl
A young woman, locked away from the world since childhood, faces life as she is suddenly set free.
In the snow of the Italian Alps a bewildered young woman is found: pale and fragile as porcelain, hypersensitive to daylight and afraid of human contact. She is put under the care of a renowned neuropsychiatrist who soon realizes he is dealing with a very rare and important case. He is convinced that his therapy will bring this woman back into life but instead of improving she regresses even more with only one wish: returning to the place that she calls ‘home’. Things change when a suicidal patient is brought in. He seems to have a strange spell on the young woman who slowly starts making first steps of socialization. Initially the patient is insensitive to all approaches but her piercing blue eyes awaken distant memories. In fact, they have been haunting him for years. Then they find the house where the woman had been imprisoned for so long - not by a monster but by a loving parent who wanted to keep the child eternally innocent, far away from the world full of danger and perversities. Will Porcelain Girl remain stuck in her past or will she find the courage to move towards the present? And in what way is the patient’s life connected to hers? Can they set each other free?
The story of Porcelain Girl is based on real-case stories of children that have been locked away from the world for years, mostly in unbearable and inhumane circumstances. Some of these children are so damaged that they never find their way back to a normal healthy life. What makes such cases even more difficult to accept is that their dramas often take place right next to us and yet we fail to notice them. I want to make a film that brings awareness to the stories of these children. The film is also born out of concern: how is it possible that such cases happen next to us and so often we do not notice anything? And my own personal fear as a potential mother: if I had a child how would I raise it in the world of today, how could I protect it when it is exposed to so many things at already so young an age? Furthermore I want to make this film because there is a bit of porcelain in all of us: we all carry our past with us and we all try to break free from it. I am interested in exploring how we are conditioned by our past and how we deal with it in the present. For me the story of Porcelain Girl is an extreme example and proof of how we can break free and find a certain peace in the present, no matter what our past has been.
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