Hoard

The past comes knocking in this four-time Venice-winning feature debut that blends grief, grime, love and childhood trauma.

Maria adores her mother, even if society may not look on her favourably. With a penchant for hoarding, Cynthia takes her daughter on bin dives for discarded goods under the guise of adding to what she calls their “catalogue of love”. That’s until a domestic incident triggers a visit from – and their separation by – social services. Fast-forward to Maria’s teenage years and she now lives with a foster family; there, a former foster, the much older Michael, returns. In him, she finds a fellow oddball; for her, he feels fascination, arousal and anguish bubbling to the surface.

Stellar performances from newcomer Saura Lightfoot Leon and Stranger Things’ Joseph Quinn elevate the simply strange to the truly engrossing in Hoard. Inspired by Ken Russell and other British filmmakers of the 1960s and 70s, Luna Carmoon’s intimate, at times confronting coming-of-age film scooped four prizes at Venice Critics’ Week. This is an impressive feat for a debutant director – one made all the more so given she originally wrote the film as a 20-page suicide note, whose creation eventually proved healing.

“Carmoon expertly creates a film which triggers every human sense the cinema possibly can … Entirely horrific, challenging, spellbinding and enchanting.” – Varsity