PODCAST | Chiara Nicoletti interviews Hlynur Palmason, director of the film Winter Brothers.
FRED’s Chiara Nicoletti interviews Hlynur Palmason, director of Winter Brothers, screening at the 70th Locarno Festival in the international competition. Hylnur Palmason was born in Iceland but studied filmmaking at the Danish National Film School. Winter Brothers is Palmason’s debut feature film so the director unveils the genesis of this project, his influences and his desire of telling a story of two people, their search for love, their struggle through life. The two brothers are both outsiders but in a very different way and it’s Emil the one who is bullied the most although his brother is also facing loneliness. Finally Palmason comments on the similarities between the dynamics and essential elements of his film with the ones composing the typical Western genre.
Winter Brothers: a brother odyssey set in a rural chalk-mining community during a cold winter. We follow two brothers working in this harsh environment focusing on the younger brother Emil, who distills moonshine made from stolen chemicals from the factory. Emil is an outsider, an oddball, who made a conscious choice for loneliness and is only accepted by the mining community due to his older brother Johan. Emil longs for passion, for being wanted and loved. When a fellow worker becomes sick, the moonshine and Emil are prime suspects. Gradually a violent feud erupts be-tween him and the tightly-knit mining community. Parallelly, Emil feels betrayed by his brother when he finds out that the neighbor girl Anna, the subject of his unfulfilled desires, chooses his older brother instead of him. Revenge, loneliness, and lack of love pervade this modern brother odyssey.
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