©Courtesy of Neon
Just in time for consideration for nest year’s Oscars, Neon plans to release Joachim Trier’s Sentimental Value on November 7, a date that signals the studio’s strategy of creating “long-lead word of mouth” for the film.
Sentimental Value won a Grand Jury Prize (second place) at the recent Cannes International Film Festival. Two other Cannes entries from this year— Kleber Mendonça Filho‘s The Secret Agent and Jafar Panahi’s It Was Just An Accident—are likely to be in contention for an Oscar in the International Features category.
Sentimental Value, a Norwegian entry, examines the emotional connections between two sisters, Nora and Agnes, when their estranged father, played by Stellan Skarsgård, casts Nora in a film he’s making but passes over Agnes when Nora declines the role. Also starring in the film are Renate Reinsve, Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas, Elle Fanning, Cory Michael Smith and Anders Danielsen Lie.
In addition to a record-breaking 15-minute standing ovation at its Cannes premiere, Sentimental Value has earned much critical acclaim: in Variety, Peter Debruge praised the film as a “mature and moving tale,” while IndieWire‘s David Ehrlich called it “a layered masterpiece that ‘The Worst Person in the World’ director Joachim Trier has been working toward for his entire life.”
At the press conference introducing the film, Trier said to Fanning: “Charli XCX gave a little hello to us, and we are super grateful. I love her music, she’s awesome. I know Elle’s a fan too. The problem is, I’ve been working so much for the last three years I don’t even know what a Joachim Trier summer is anymore…”
The director added: “I think what we wanted to do was something about reconciliation, family, and time … We’re in the middle of life now and have a bigger perspective on the life span of a human being and realize that often inside any complicated parent there’s a wounded child. And we realized that in the character of Gustav Borg, even if he’s a complicated father, because he’s an artist he has two languages. We wanted to talk about the vulnerability of communication, the lack of ability to talk in a family and seeing if art could play into that.”