Anita Gou’s producing profession focuses on serving to filmmakers and creatives deliver their private passions and visions to the display screen. With Focus Options’ Cannes Un Sure Regard entry “The Silent Twins” from director Agniezska Smoczynska, her streak producing singular visions — corresponding to Lula Wang’s “The Farewell” and “Honeyboy,” the collaboration of writer-actor Shia LeBeouf and Alma Har’el — continues.
She began in the enterprise proper out of college getting her ft moist in post-production on larger studio movies.
“I form of shortly realized by way of that have — although very fruitful and eye-opening — that my ardour was actually about extra independently pushed movies, extra idiosyncratic storytelling, storytellers and tales. So I shortly navigated easy methods to discover my method to in direction of the form of filmmakers I need to be working with.”
“The Silent Twins” tells the story of two Black ladies, June and Jennifer Gibbons, who, rising up in Nineteen Seventies Wales, solely communicated with one another, and created their very own world, wrote fiction and dedicated crimes of their teenagers. They had been ultimately dedicated to a psychological well being facility. The movie is predicated on the bestseller by Marjorie Wallace. It acquired a four-minute standing ovation after its Could 24 Cannes debut.
Smoczynska makes her English-language bow. Leticia Wright and Tamara Lawrance star. “[Wright] was additionally one in all the early collaborators — it’s a ardour challenge for her as effectively.”
Gou encountered Smoczynska’s work for the first time at Sundance. “I keep in mind seeing first ‘The Lure’ at Sundance and was blown away, simply hadn’t seen something prefer it,” Gou mentioned.
“Silent Twins” screenwriter Andrea Seigel additionally “remembered her work and so earlier on had reached out to her.” Their connection grew and their want to work .
“I believe all of us form of understood that Aga might deliver this distinctive method to the storytelling. Her greatest precedence from day one was easy methods to inform it from the women’ perspective and never form of deal with them as outsiders. For a lot of, a few years individuals informed their story in that means. And I believe we actually wished to do one thing completely different this time and humanize [them] by way of their perspective and guarantee dimensional characters,” Gou mentioned.
The movie is Polish-British co-prod, with veteran Polish producers Klaudia Śmieja-Rostworowska and Ewa Puszczyńska on board, serving to information the shoot by way of COVID protocols as effectively.
“The truth that we had been in a position to shoot in Poland, with the unimaginable producers Klaudia and Ewa — they made it look simple, though it was extremely difficult.”
As for Gou’s Cannes debut, “given the means the movie got here collectively, having been in a position to place it at Cannes with its lengthy historical past of supporting European arthouse and with the ability to give a platform to stunning tales and stunning voices, it simply it simply felt like the excellent match.”