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

In the second major prize announcement by a Directors’ Fortnight spouse, “The Mountain” (“La Montagne”), from emerging French auteur Thomas Salvador, has gained the SACD Prize, awarded by France’s Writers’ Guild for the best French-language film in the portion.

The next function of the French actor-director soon after 2017’s promising “Vincent,” picked for San Sebastian’s status New Administrators section, ”The Mountain” is offered internationally by Le Pacte which will also handle distribution in France.

From a screenplay created by Salvador and Naila Guiguet, which was selected for Critics’ Weeks’ Up coming Steps 2020, “The Mountain” turns on Pierre, 40, played by Salvador, who can make a revenue 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 down below the Aiguille du Midi cable vehicle station, a spectacular pinnacle at 12,600 ft, 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 third will make a dramatic tonal change into the supernatural.

Minimal clarification is supplied to the finale, as minimal was made as to why Vincent, in Salvador’s debut, acquires tremendous-human powers  when in make contact with with water.

Salvador  told Le Movie Français in an job interview that Pierre is “searching for what he actually needs in life and to strike a balance involving that and his marriage with other individuals.”

“Prizing ‘The Mountain,’ we are prizing the prodigious audacity and radiant simplicity of generous filmmaking. The spectacular and intimate ambition of the film, its delicate creating and its stylistic ambition get us on a memorable journey,” explained SACD’s Delphine Gleize, a writer-director, including that the award was the “consecration of a writer, a director who also acts, and of an auteur.”

Earlier winners of SACD’s Directors’ Fortnight prize take is many of France’s foremost administrators, equally very well set up and up-and-coming, this sort of as Rebecca Zlotowski (“An Quick Lady,” 2019), Claire Denis (“Let the Sunshine In,” 2017) Philippe Garrel (“Lover for a Working day,” 2017) and and Arnaud Desplechin (“My Golden Times,” 2015). 

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