Canadian filmmaker Kim Nguyen burst onto the international scene a few years back with “War Witch,” with the picture winning Prize of the Ecumenical Jury – Special Mention and Silver Bear Best Actress at the Berlin Film Festival, and picking up more honors along the way. Four years later and he’s back with “Two Lovers And A Bear,” which premiered this spring at the Cannes Film Festival, and is gearing up to open north of the border.
Starring Dane DeHaan and Tatiana Maslany, the film follows a young couple, deeply in love, who head to the furthest, coldest reaches of the far north, where they both hope to escape their various pasts. Here’s the official synopsis:
We are in the Great North, near the North Pole, in a modern town where about two hundred souls live precariously in minus fifty weather, and where roads lead to nowhere but the endless white. It is in this eerie lunar landscape that Lucy and Roman, two young tormented souls, fell in love. But now, ghosts from Lucy’s past are coming back, and she needs to run away or she will burn.
Together, these lovers decide to make a leap for life, a leap for inner peace. They head out in the Great White, where the strangeness makes one feel he is travelling inside of himself.
Our critic on the Croisette didn’t much care for the movie, calling it a “confounded fantasy,” but audiences will get another chance to check it out when “Two Lovers And A Bear” makes its North American premiere at TIFF and opens in Canada on October 7th (there’s no U.S. distributor for the movie at the moment).
