The EnergaCamerimage International Film Festival has unveiled the first batch of movies selected for its 2024 main competition — a trio of aesthetically adventurous stories about women.
The selection includes Jacques Audiard’s Cannes jury prize winner Emilia Pérez, Magnus von Horn’s arthouse drama The Girl with the Needle, and Rachel Morrison’s boxing biopic The Fire Inside. Camerimage organizers will unveil the rest of this year’s competition selection — which usually totals around a dozen movies — in the days ahead.
As previously announced, this year’s Camerimage competition will be assessed by a panel led by jury president and two-time Oscar-winner Cate Blanchett.
Emilia Pérez and The Girl with the Needle both premiered at the Cannes Film Festival in May — and both were selected by THR‘s critics as among the best films of the 2024 edition.
“Zoe Saldaña, Selena Gomez and the divine Karla Sofia Gascón light up Audiard’s fabulous musical in which a Mexican drug lord enlists the help of a lawyer to undergo gender-affirming surgery and start a new life,” wrote THR‘s lead critic David Rooney in his sum-up of Emilia Pérez, continuing: “The French director (A Prophet, Rust and Bone) has always been adventurous, and his latest creation dexterously spans styles: It’s a redemption narrative with a current of Almodóvarian humor, moments of melodrama, noir, social realism, a hint of telenovela camp and an escalation into suspense touched by tragedy.”
Of The Girl with the Needle, THR critic Leslie Felperin said: “In von Horn’s piercingly sad, urgently timely drama, Vic Carmen Sonne delivers a multilayered performance as a seamstress in post-World War I Copenhagen, left high and dry when her wealthy lover gets her pregnant but won’t marry her. That leaves her with two choices: give herself an abortion with a knitting needle or have the baby and hand it over to a sinister woman (the great Trine Dyrholm) who runs a backstreet adoption agency. The film builds to a devastating climax.”
Written by Barry Jenkins (Moonlight), The Fire Inside is the directorial debut of cinematographer Rachel Morrison. The film was a critical favorite at this year’s Toronto festival, where THR‘s reviewer described it as “an immersive, pull-no-punches dramatic account of the ascendancy of Claressa Shields, the Flint, Michigan, Black teen who would become the only American boxer, male or female, in the history of the sport to win back-to-back gold medals at the Olympic Games.”
The 2024 Camerimage festival will open on Nov. 16 with a screening of Steve McQueen’s World War II epic Blitz. Other announced highlights include a special honor for Shogun star Hiroyuki Sanada and the world premiere of Alec Baldwin’s indie Western Rust. A special panel discussion will be held after Rust‘s first screening to honor the memory of cinematographer Halyna Hutchins, who was tragically killed in an on-set accident during production. Camerimage famously focuses on achievements in the art of cinematography. Blanchett and her fellow jurors will unveil the winners of the festival’s Golden Frog awards at a ceremony on Nov. 23.
