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

In the next major prize announcement by a Directors’ Fortnight partner, “The Mountain” (“La Montagne”), from emerging French auteur Thomas Salvador, has received the SACD Prize, awarded by France’s Writers’ Guild for the best French-language motion picture in the segment.

The second aspect of the French actor-director following 2017’s promising “Vincent,” picked for San Sebastian’s status New Directors portion, ”The Mountain” is marketed internationally by Le Pacte which will also manage distribution in France.

From a screenplay composed by Salvador and Naila Guiguet, which was picked for Critics’ Weeks’ Upcoming Techniques 2020, “The Mountain” turns on Pierre, 40, played by Salvador, who would make a income pitch for his company’s robotic arm in Chamonix, the capital of the French Alps.

When his colleagues return to Paris, he stays on, pitching a tent just beneath the Aiguille du Midi cable car station, a stunning pinnacle at 12,600 feet, 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 motion picture in its very last 3rd will make a extraordinary tonal shift into the supernatural.

Tiny explanation is offered to the finale, as small was made as to why Vincent, in Salvador’s debut, acquires super-human powers  when in call with drinking water.

Salvador  told Le Movie Français in an job interview that Pierre is “searching for what he actually dreams in lifetime and to strike a stability amongst that and his marriage with other persons.”

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

Previous winners of SACD’s Directors’ Fortnight prize get is quite a few of France’s foremost administrators, both of those nicely recognized and up-and-coming, this sort of as Rebecca Zlotowski (“An Straightforward Woman,” 2019), Claire Denis (“Let the Sunshine In,” 2017) Philippe Garrel (“Lover for a Day,” 2017) and and Arnaud Desplechin (“My Golden Times,” 2015). 

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