Award-winning Slovak producer and filmmaker Mira Fornay is currently working on a lockdown film called She - Hero [+leggi anche:
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scheda film] (working title: Heroine’s Journey). After her previous works My Dog Killer [+leggi anche:
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intervista: Mira Fornay
scheda film], which dealt with neo-Nazism and domestic abuse, respectively, Fornay is helming a different type of movie. She - Hero is described as a poetic film, or a “film poem”, loosely inspired by the filmmaker’s childhood around the River Danube. The feature will be a combination of fiction and documentary. In contrast with the social topics that Fornay tackled in her previous films, and which she also plans to broach in her upcoming mystery-drama miniseries Carpathian Beast that she is working on (see the news; its release has now been postponed until 2023/2024), the director noted that she wants to bring some light to these times dominated by the pandemic, and thematise nature as a refuge and sanctuary through a story about beauty and good.

The story follows seven-year-old protagonist Romy, who is supposed to be in quarantine, as she and her family have returned from abroad. Romy finds out that her budgerigar has flown away and decides to leave the flat to find the tiny bird. The young protagonist wanders through the forest and a dead river channel of the Danube, meeting a variety of different characters during her adventure in the wilderness over the course of a single day. With She - Hero, Fornay is returning to topics from her film-school days, centring on a poetic reflection of a child’s inner world, as she did in her graduation short film, Small Untold Things. She aims to offer a probe into “a child’s innocent soul, through places of wilderness and memories”.

She - Hero is a two-country co-production, with the director producing for her own company, Mirafox, and Viktor Schwarcz, of Cineart TV Prague, co-producing on the Czech side. Schwarcz worked on Fornay’s three previous feature-length projects. The director confirmed to Cineuropa that the first shooting phase had wrapped. The second phase will be carried out in the autumn, followed by post-production, which is planned to start in November. Slovak cinematographer Denisa Buranová is lensing the film, and she and the director opted for a “Dogme” style without any artificial lighting, and shooting on location with a hand-held camera, with some improvisation and minimal use of props.

She - Hero is supported by the Slovak Audiovisual Fund.