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"Brilliant Earth brings ethically sourced jewelry to Santa Monica Place

Santa Monicans in the market for jewelry now have a new option at Santa Monica Place, where ethics and transparency-focused jewelry company Brilliant Earth opened a new showroom last week.

Brilliant Earth, which has a nationwid"

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"e and online presence, was created in 2005 after founder Beth Gerstein was unsatisfied with the available selection when looking for her own ring.

“She was seeking an engagement ring that really spoke to her personal values and asking a lot of questions about transparency and sourcing practices,” president of merchandising and retail expansion Kathryn Money. “And [she] really felt that there was an opportunity for a more mission focused brand really driven by ethical sourcing.”

All of the diamonds sold by Brilliant Earth are what the company calls “beyond conflict free,” meaning that not only are they sourced in a way that ensures they do not finance wars or human rights abuses, but Money said they also work with their suppliers to minimize environmental degradation and foster safe labor practices.

“We’re a mission driven organization,” Money said. “To be focused on ethical sourcing and utilizing business for positive social change – our mission is to cultivate a more ethical, transparent and sustainable jewelry industry.”

According to a Brilliant Earth spokesperson, whenever the company opens a new showroom they make a donation to a local organization. In Santa Monica, employees chose the social service organization The People Concern.

Money said that they chose Santa Monica as the location for the newest showroom based on customer data and analytics from their online platform.

“We knew that Santa Monica was a place where we have a strong existing and growing customer base…” Money said. “In addition to the data, we look at a lot of qualitative factors that make a market and a neighborhood really compelling for us. So we’ll look at things like co-tenancy of other like minded brands… we of course, look at the physical environment in the neighborhood and make sure that we feel like it’s in alignment with our premium yet approachable brand.”

Money said the Santa Monica showroom was designed to be a comfortable and inviting place.

“Shopping for jewelry can be an intimidating experience, particularly when you’re shopping for an engagement ring,” she said. “It’s an emotionally weighty purchase, a very expensive and considered purchase. So, when we were designing our showrooms, we really wanted to create a space that feels welcoming, approachable, and relaxing while still delivering that elevated and premium experience.”

The opening is a hopeful sign for the mall after a roller coaster couple of years with some stores closing, others changing concept and recently a handful of new openings.

Since 2021, Santa Monica Place has lost the Disney Store, Bloomingdale’s and its movie theater. Sonoma Wine Garden became LouLou’s and Supermodel Tyra Banks opened her ModelLand concept.

Officials hope more retail options of any kind will encourage residents to shop local and recent tax data suggests the city is seeing a rebound in its sales tax figures this year with signs consumers are looking for local experiences.

The city reported a 27 percent increase overall in sales tax between Q1 of 2021 and Q1 of 2022. Those gain

"NATIONAL SPICY GUACAMOLE DAY

National Spicy Guacamole Day brings together some fresh flavors on November 14th. Call your friends, get the chips ready, and celebrate with a bowl of spicy guacamole dip.

#SpicyGuacamoleDay

Originating with the Aztecs in Mexico, guacamole is an avocado-based sauce. It’"

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"s become popular in American cuisine as a dip, condiment, and salad ingredient.

Guacamole is made by using a mortar and pestle to mash ripe avocados and then mixing in sea salt. Sometimes tomatoes, onion, garlic, lemon juice, chili, yogurt, or other seasonings are added. Jalapenos, chilis, cumin or red pepper can be added to the recipe to make the guacamole spicy.

When is National Avocado Day?

Super Bowl Sunday and Cinco de Mayo celebrations feature guacamole as a staple snack. As a result, avocado sales have soared to 30 million pounds on those two days each year.

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A simple avocado carries a healthy punch of unsaturated fat (the good one). Additionally, a single avocado includes substantial amounts of Vitamins C and E. Good things come in small packages, though. There are nearly 400 calories in 1 cup of guacamole.

Does an avocado ever give you trouble when you have a hankering for guac? Well, there are some tricks to getting it just right. Make sure your avocado is ripe and add a few drops of lemon to keep the avocado from browning. It also adds a bright flavor. While picking ripe avocados can be daunting, it doesn’t have to be. A ripe avocado typically has mid-green to darker skin. It will give a little when lightly squeezed. However, a bruised avocado will be dimpled.

HOW TO OBSERVE SPICY GUACAMOLE DAY

One of the easiest snacks to make is guacamole. Add a hint of spice and your celebration is ready. You only need to add some chips and maybe a few friends to share it with you. Give a shout out to those you know who makes the best guacamole, too.

Don’t have a recipe? Here’s a simple one to try:

Spicy Guacamole

Use #SpicyGuacamoleDay to post on social media.

NATIONAL SPICY GUACAMOLE DAY HISTORY

National Day Calendar® continues researching the origins of this super tasty food holiday.

Guacamole FAQ

Q. How do I pick a ripe avocado?

A. Unlike many other fruits, color does not indicate ripeness in an avocado. A ripe avocado will give slightly with a little pressure but it will not be mushy. An unripe avocado will be hard.

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Q. How soon should I use a ripe avocado?

An avocado’s window of ripeness is short. It will turn from ripe to overripe in a short time. However, keeping an avocado cool in the fridge will help keep it fresh and ripe longer for delicious guacamole.

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"‘Alcarràs’ Review: A Farming Family Faces Change in a Beautifully Observed, Richly Inhabited Ensemble Drama

Catalan writer-director Carla Simón confirms the promise of her debut 'Summer 1993' in this poignant, rippling study of an extended family being forced off their farm.

You can practically sme"

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"ll the midsummer fatigue that wafts through “Alcarràs” on the faintest and most occasional of breezes: a mixture of sweat, baked earth and ripe, plump peaches, inviting in the moment but suggestive of future spoiling. All simple seasonal pleasures are on borrowed time in Carla Simón’s lovely, bittersweet agricultural drama, and not just because winter is inevitably coming. For the large, garrulous Solé clan, who have spent every summer of their lives picking fruit from their familial orchard, this looks to be the last in that tradition, as they face imminent eviction from their patch of land in Catalonia. Yet as they squabble over their uncertain future — and plenty else besides — the sun shines and peaches droop voluptuously from endangered branches. There’s nothing for it but to complete the final harvest.

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In her second feature, Catalan writer-director Carla Simón returns to the rural region that served as the backdrop to her remarkable, autobiographical debut “Summer 1993,” and the film once more benefits from her warm affinity for this alternately parched and verdant landscape. That “Alcarràs” has been granted a Competition slot at this year’s Berlinale — four years after “Summer 1993” bowed at the same festival in the far lower-profile Generation sidebar — is indicative of the global impression made by Simón’s unassuming but utterly winning debut.

Her follow-up shares and builds on many of that film’s virtues, from her subtly textured, fully inhabited evocation of place to her sure hand with non-professional actors, who this time make up the entire ensemble. A more drifting sense of narrative drive than the already mellow “Summer 1993” might make “Alcarràs” a slightly harder arthouse sell, but it confirms the strength and consistency of Simón’s directorial voice.

If “Alcarràs” isn’t as much of a memoir, it’s still rooted in Simón’s personal history, with the title referring to the small village where her family has maintained a peach farm across multiple generations. But from that native location, her latest spirals into fiction, contemplating the worst case scenario for most traditional independent farmers being crowded out by industrial development. The film balances a bristling political conscience against its tenderly observed domestic drama.

As the opening scene observes young children playing games of make-believe in the rusted shell of a vintage car — incongruous against sprawling farmland — Simón briefly wrongfoots us into thinking she has again assumed the child’s-eye perspective of her debut. As turns out, “Alcarràs” deftly hopscotches between points of view in the close but conflict-inclined Solé family. None of those is purer or more upbeat than that of six-year-old Iris (Ainet Jounou), who still sees the the farmstead, with its climbing roses and gnarled grapevines and long, inviting groves of feather-leaved peach tree

"‘Love Life’ Review: Koji Fukada’s Life-After-Loss Drama is Full of Tragedy But Strangely Lightweight

The death of a child places a marriage in uncertain limbo in the Japanese auteur's heartfelt but somewhat maudlin new film.

Even the most solidly founded of marriages can be strained and shattered b"

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"y the death of a child. For handsome, wholesome Japanese couple Taeko and Jiro, however, that tragedy shows up all the fault lines that were already in their young relationship, and that’s before living ghosts of the past show up for both partners. Koji Fukada’s “Love Life” unabashedly embraces melodramatic contrivance in its examination of modern middle-class love tested as much by social prejudices as by personal demons; it just does so with such pallid, polite reserve that its sentimentality never becomes transcendently moving. As such, this agreeable but overlong pic finds the Japanese writer-director still struggling to regain the form of his jolting 2016 Cannes prizewinner “Harmonium.”

That film was an exercise in disorienting tonal contrast and conflict, with a vein of blood-dark comedy running through severely tragic events. “Love Life,” on the other hand, is an earnest, largely humorless affair: While it’s impossible not to be affected at some level by its characters’ hellish plight, the predominant softness of tone here tends toward the wispy. Dignified performances and assured, restrained craftsmanship see the film through to a satisfying enough resolution, but this Venice competition entry may not have the necessary impact to secure widespread arthouse distribution.

The opening scenes establish an early sense of the domestic placidity and faint emotional distance that marks relations between Taeko (Fumino Kimura) and Jiro (Kento Nagayama) in the small, neat apartment they share in a Japanese coastal town. Their respective routines tend to converge over six-year-old Keita (Tetta Shimada), Taeka’s bright, chipper son from a previous relationship: Though Jiro is a kind father to the lad, the matter of his parentage feels like one more territorial division between spouses who don’t share their lives entirely.

Jiro’s parents Makoto (Tomorowo Taguchi) and Akie (Misuzu Kanno) live in the same building, but that too isn’t quite the cozy arrangement it outwardly appears to be: Makoto has never approved of his son’s marrying a divorced mother, and the limits of their cordiality begin to show over the course of the family birthday party that begins proceedings. The day will turn far worse, however, when Keita suddenly dies in an all-too-conceivable household mishap — one that plays out, only part-visibly, in the space of a single static shot judiciously framed by Fukada and DP Hideo Yamamoto. In the space of a few minutes, the family’s most binding tie is severed, casting the living and grieving immediately adrift.

Fukada dramatizes the immediate aftermath of the event with credible, suitably mundane delicacy: “Love Life” is best at negotiating periods of strained, not quite simpatico silence, as when Jiro tries to intuit whether or not to take down the party decorations that now accidentally mark Keita’s death, or a shellshocked Taeko attempts to choose photos for a memorial slideshow. Things take a less convincing turn with the arrival of Taeko’s deaf Korean ex Park (Atom Sunada), who crashes the funeral

"‘Our Ties’ Review: A Brain Injury Affects the Whole Family in Roschdy Zem’s Well-Observed Dramedy

The grown-up siblings of a combative but loving French family are challenged when the kindest and most pliant of their number undergoes a drastic change of personality following an injury.

Of all the i"

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"mmediate familial relationships agonized over in the movies, it’s probably the bonds of siblinghood that remain the least explored. In his sixth film as director, French multihyphenate Roschdy Zem redresses that imbalance just a little, with the charming, unassuming but hardly inconsequential “Our Ties”: a heartfelt and beautifully played burst of bright chatter that doesn’t reinvent the wheel of the domestic drama, but does watch it turn with an unusually compassionate, affectionate eye.

As it opens, Moussa (Sami Bouajila, winner of the 2019 Venice Horizons Best Actor award for Mehdi Barsaoui’s “A Son”) is in the middle of a crisis, not that you’d necessarily know it from the gently perplexed way he is handling his wife Nora’s sudden decision to end their relationship. Nora is in Morocco, where she spends a lot of her time for work, and Moussa, getting nothing but her voicemail, has finally come to the realization that she is serious about their split. Less angry than he is dazed, according to her wishes he packs up all her things, but is helpless to know what to do with them. His concerned, no-nonsense sister Samia (a note-perfect Meriem Serbah), the only one in whom he’s confided about the breakup, takes charge of giving the clothes and jewelry away.

He may be suffering emotional turmoil, but it’s his youngest daughter’s 12th birthday, and a raucously multigenerational family gathering is planned in celebation. So while his older children Nesrine (Nina Zem) and Amir (Carl Malapa) squabble over Amir’s loony flat-earth beliefs, Moussa, sitting in between the outspoken Samia and their successful TV presenter brother Ryad (Zem), with his elder brothers Adil (Abel Jafri) and Salah (Rachid Bouchareb) plus various spouses in attendance, selflessly slips into his regular role as quiet, reliably good-humored mediator.

With an accurate and amused ear for the conversational dynamics of squabbling relatives, the screenplay, co-written by Zem and Maïwenn and based on an incident in Zem’s brother’s life, cleverly delivers a welter of information about every member of this sprawling clan via an escalating discussion that pivots on whether Ryad ever thanked Moussa for some pastries. Ryad, already bristling at the accusation that he is not attentive to his family or to his girlfriend Emma (Maïwenn), insists that such politenesses are unnecessary between brothers. Samia, rankling on Moussa’s behalf, doubles down on her accusation of Ryad’s callousness. Just when things threaten to erupt, Moussa gently defuses the time bomb of stored-up petty resentments that every family sets ticking whenever they get together.

So when Moussa, lonely after his secret split, goes out drinking with an attractive co-worker, gets pukingly drunk and keels over, we know it’s atypical behavior. And when the concussion he sustains turns out to be more serious, and he starts sleeping through the day and snapping at his kids, the circles under his eyes darkening like some kind of light is being slowly extinguished from within, we understand the hov

"‘The Fabelmans’ Review: Steven Spielberg Takes a Sweet, Heavily Filtered Selfie of His Formative Years

The master of escapist entertainment gets personal in this 150-minute self-portrait, crafting a loving homage to the complicated relationship with his parents that has informed so much of his work."

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"

No director has done more to deconstruct the myth of the suburban American family than Steven Spielberg. Dissertations have been written and documentaries made on the subject. And now, at the spry young age of 75, Spielberg himself weighs in on where his preoccupations come from in “The Fabelmans,” a personal account of his upbringing that feels like listening to two and a half hours’ worth of well-polished cocktail-party anecdotes, only better, since he’s gone to the trouble of staging them all for our benefit. Spielberg’s a born storyteller, and these are arguably his most precious stories.

From the first movie he saw (“The Greatest Show on Earth”) to memories of meeting filmmaker John Ford on the Paramount lot, this endearing, broadly appealing account of how Spielberg was smitten by the medium — and why the prodigy nearly abandoned picture-making before his career even started — holds the keys to so much of the master’s filmography. More similar to Woody Allen’s autobiographical “Radio Days” than it is to European art films such as “The 400 Blows” and “Amarcord” (the more highbrow models other directors typically point to when re-creating their childhoods), “The Fabelmans” invites audiences into the home and headspace of the world’s most beloved living director, an oddly sanitized zone where even the trauma — which includes anti-Semitism, financial disadvantage and divorce — seems to go better with fresh-buttered popcorn.

Now, if you’ve grown up with Spielberg’s movies (and who hasn’t?), you’ve surely picked up on certain recurring themes, especially in the way parents relate to their kids. Whether it’s an emotionally distant dad letting his family fall apart in “Close Encounters of the Third Kind” or an adult Peter Pan fighting for his children in “Hook,” such bonds clearly matter in Spielberg’s on-screen fictions because the same connections broke down in his off-screen reality. Here, the director (with repeat collaborator Tony Kushner helping him to write his first script since 2001’s “A.I. Artificial Intelligence”) shares what his own family was like — while allowing room for a certain amount of creative license, of course.

Dad is an engineer named Burt (Paul Dano) whose early work in the field of computer science obliges the Fabelmans to move houses multiple times over a few years’ time, from New Jersey to Arizona to Northern California. Michelle Williams plays his more emotionally sensitive mother, Mitzi, who could have been a concert pianist, going out of her way to encourage the creative interests of her son Sam (Gabrielle LaBelle). Mitzi is also prone to depression and behavior the young boy can’t always understand — but which six decades of introspection and analysis have apparently clarified in his mind.

Mom has a similar capacity to psychoanalyze her kids, recognizing how little Sammy (played by Mateo Zoryon Francis-DeFord in the earliest scenes) can’t seem to handle a train wreck he witnessed in “The Greatest Show on Earth.” It’s all just a movie, of course, but before he can move on, the bo

"Marian Mathias Focuses on Small Acts of Kindness in Her Buzzy Feature Debut ‘Runner,’ Which Gets a Trailer (EXCLUSIVE)

Fresh off screenings at Toronto and San Sebastian, U.S. director Marian Mathias is still surprised her feature debut “Runner” connected with audiences and programmers alike.

Pro"

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"duced by Joy Jorgensen, the intimate drama is a Killjoy Films production made in association with Pigasus Pictures. Easy Riders Films and Man Alive co-produce. Heretic, which is handling international sales, shared the films trailer in exclusivity with Variety.

“I was thinking about it the other night. As a young filmmaker – and I am very fresh-faced to the scene – how do I navigate these waters? Do I stay true to my voice or shift to satisfy others?” wonders the director.

“I decided to be more authentic to what I find interesting. I am so happy there is a space for it at these festivals.”

Following a girl named Haas (German-born Hannah Schiller), raised by a single father somewhere in Missouri and burdened by his manic behavior, Mathias wanted to focus on brief encounters that can change everything, she notes. After her father’s death, Haas needs to bury him in his hometown. That’s where she meets Will.

“That’s the core of the film: it’s about two strangers who find, change, and leave one another,” she points out.

“It’s just a boy, offering Haas a ride on his bike. But to her, it’s a small act of kindness. You can really make an impact on someone’s life if you make space for others.”

Lensed by Jomo Fray, at times “Runner” feels like Andrew Wyeth’s 1948 painting “Christina’s World” suddenly coming to life.

“I love a straight line or clean horizon. It’s where the earth meets the sky and the dead meet the living. There was this house on a lonely plain in rural Indiana and it really reminded me of that painting. It’s one of these happy accidents that end up being a wonderful nod.”

But while her film seems to be taking place after World War II, with her characters humming “I Saw the Light,” she wanted it to feel “atemporal,” says Mathias.

“It could be a contemporary story, it could be a period story. My family is from the Midwest as well and a lot of these places feel a bit suspended in time. Maybe that’s where it comes from.”

Forced to stay in a small inn while waiting for her father’s burial, Haas also encounters Baggy: a “lonely cinephile” who lives through the characters populating his tiny TV set.

“He is one of my favorite characters,” admits the helmer. Baggy is played by “The Hateful Eight” actor Gene Jones, soon to be seen in “Killers of the Flower Moon.”

“He wants to reach out [to Haas] but he doesn’t know how. To me, that’s the most heartbreaking thing about the modern age. People want to connect but it becomes so much harder.”

Still, her characters do connect in her film. And it allows them to ultimately move forward.

“Haas is hanging onto the promise that her father was a good man. What would he be like as a young man? Maybe by getting to know Will she is getting to know her father? I wanted to show the cyclical nature of life, how things go on with or without you.”

Their relationship, based on silences and small gestures (“the devil is in the details,” laughs Mathias) stays ambiguous until the end, in between love and friendship.

“There is one shot when after meeting Will the sun

"‘Alcarràs’ Director Carla Simón On Harvesting Peaches, Learning From Each Film

Carla Simón’s first feature “Summer 1993” was a knockout; a Generation Kplus and Best First Feature award winner at the 2017 Berlinale and Spain’s 2018 Oscars submission, winning three Spanish Academy Goya Awards. The di"

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"rector has since become a reference within a new wave of Catalan women filmmakers that have broken out to considerable box office and festival success.

Now, Simón competes in Berlin’s main competition with her sophomore effort “Alcarràs,” exploring her own roots through her adoptive mother’s family.

Set in the so-called Catalan Far West, in a small village near Lleida, the film is shot entirely using non-professional actors. “Alcarràs” tells the story of a family who make their living harvesting peaches and are forced to abandon the lands they have been taking care of for sixty years under a perpetual verbal agreement with the landowner. After the landowner’s death, his heirs no longer recognize the agreement and want to change the situation.

“Alcarràs” is sold by MK2 and produced by Elástica Films, Avalon, Vilaüt Films and Kino Produzioni.

How is “Alcarràs” a follow-up of “Summer 1993,” and a step forward in your career?

The continuity is in the tone, in looking for a special realism in the actors, in this case non-actors, with the aim to keep them all “alive.” However, “Alcarràs” needed much more structure, especially for the work on the point of view. Whereas in “Summer 1993” we just followed the protagonist continuously, here we have twelve separate characters. As far as camera planning, “Alcarràs” required a very different effort.

Beyond the tone and structure, can you talk about the visual proposal of the film’s rural environment?

For me, the camera must tell the story for the characters; love them, caress them without the viewer perceiving other stylistic details. In the end, the visual proposal has its own poetry, but it’s deeply rooted in the land, which is what the film is about. Where do I put the camera? For me it should go where the character and their emotions dictate. This has been my philosophy, although I realize that I like long shots, because it keeps the feeling of being with the characters.

In times of gentrification, you tackle a family’s attachment to the land…

Agriculture is the theme of the film and was a key reason for me to make the film. My uncles grow peaches in Alcarràs and, like them, there are many other people who are really screwed, because it is very difficult to engage in family farming at present. I would certainly like to raise awareness about this. The severe changes that are being suffered and why this type of agriculture is not protected. Ultimately, it is this form of agriculture that is most respectful to the earth.

In a rural environment and being a film with so many characters, the work with sound must have been another decisive element…

When you’re working with many people, a lot of things happen at once and the cinema becomes two-dimensional. You can play with perspective, but what really gives you the feeling that there’s a lot going on at the same time is the sound, and we worked on this thoroughly.

“Summer 1993” was remarkable for the performances of its non-pro actors. Did you change your directing methods in “Alcarràs”?

It was a similar process but m

"Valentina Maurel’s Thessaloniki Winner ‘I Have Electric Dreams’ Explores Complexities of Family Relationships, Sexual Awakening

Valentina Maurel’s coming-of-age drama “I Have Electric Dreams” has proved a major winner on the international festival circuit and a daring work that further highlights C"

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“So whatever you wish that others would do to you, do also to them, for this is the Law and the Prophets."" #Jesus #Catholic.

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"osta Rica’s burgeoning film scene. The film won the prizes for director, actress and actor at the Locarno Film Festival, and San Sebastián Film Festival’s Horizons Award. The film continued its winning streak this week at the Thessaloniki Film Festival, where it took home the Golden Alexander for best feature film, and leading man Reinaldo Amien Gutiérrez also won the award for best actor.

The film follows Eva, a restless 16-year-old girl who is experiencing her sexual awakening and is desperate to leave the house she shares with her mother and younger sister and move in with her estranged father, a troubled creative artist who paints, sculpts, writes poetry and drinks too much.

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The film is a personal work that explores darker aspects of family relationships, Maurel explains.

“It’s inspired by the things that I know, from my own life, but it’s not an autobiographical film. It’s a film I wanted to do about the complexities of family relationships, about violence. And I especially wanted to make a film that wasn’t about Costa Rican culture or what it is to live in a tropical paradise in Central America.”

She wanted to instead tell a story that could happen anywhere. “Sometimes when you come from a small country you feel the obligation, the responsibility of representing it culturally in order to interest European or North American audiences. So I thought, I will try not to do that.”

Daniela Marín Navarro and Reinaldo Amien Gutiérrez in “I Have Electric Dreams”

Valentina Maurel

In telling Eva’s story and the often shocking and disturbing events she experiences, Maurel sought to present an honest portrait of the complexity of life free of moral judgement. “I felt that life is way more complicated. I wanted to be faithful in showing that life can be very blurry, and that’s what makes situations complicated for everybody.”

She adds: “I wanted the characters to be complex and I wanted them to be in situations in which the spectator is not really sure about the difference between right and wrong because that’s how it is in everyday life. If we always have the moral distance to judge good from wrong, then life would be easier.”

Maurel was also eager to focus on a generation of people in Costa Rica that have broken with the country’s established social norms – people that are more modern, artistic and bohemian.

“Costa Rica is a country that has a strong middle class – it’s starting to disappear but it’s still there. I wanted to be critical about this situation of privilege that we have in Costa Rica. If you compare it to other countries in the region, we are in a situation of privilege, but that doesn’t mean that there aren’t very machista and violent things happening.

“We tend to forget this because the situations in the neighboring countries are so bad. We believe we are very advanced, but there is still a lot of work to do.”

Noting that Costa

"Lotfi Achour’s ‘Red Path’ Wends Through the Cairo Film Connection

The recent success of Cannes Directors’ Fortnight urban noir “Ashkal” from helmer Youssef Chebbi, and the 2021 international feature Oscar nomination for the provocative art world drama “The Man Who Sold His Skin” from director Kaout"

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"her Ben Hania reignited industry interest in projects from Tunisian directors. The Cairo Film Connection’s work-in-progress section supports this interest by offering the first Arab world look at “Red Path,” the second feature from Tunisian theater and cinema helmer Lotfi Achour (“Burning Hope”). The production is very different in style and genre from those of his aforementioned compatriots.

Inspired by real events and deeply rooted in a particular social context, “Red Path” is set in an extremely poor and isolated region of Tunisia’s northwest where, in 2015, terrorists attacked two young shepherds. They decapitated the older boy and commanded his younger cousin to bring the severed head back to the family as a gruesome message.

Achour says, “Like all Tunisians, I was furious at my country for once again failing to protect its most vulnerable children, and not even coming to their aid when the worst happened. Nevertheless, I also felt complicit in the state of misery and abandonment in which this community found itself, and which left them at the mercy of bloodthirsty fanatics.”

Although Achour’s narrative is marked by a bloody starting point, he refuses to exploit the gruesome aspects. Rather, through the main youngster and his unique mourning process, the helmer explores the precise moment in life when the boy is brutally wrenched from innocence, and becomes aware of the violence of the world. It’s also the moment when the lad realizes that the adults he had previously thought were capable of protecting him are powerless.

Achour ups the veracity factor of his three adolescent characters by casting non-professionals from the region. To prepare them for the shooting, he used an extended pre-production period to work with them and other teenagers from the area.

The film marks a first collaboration between Achour and the expressive Polish cinematographer Wojciech Staron, known for international titles such as Paula Markovitch’s “The Prize,” Laila Pakalnina’s “Dawn” and Diego Lerman’s “Refugiado” and “Sort of Family,” among others. Producer Anissa Daoud says, “Staron’s filmography and sensibility matches Lotfi’s vision perfectly. His way of filming children (a discreet and immersive camera, as close as possible to the faces, textures and skins prematurely damaged by the trials of life), his way of filming landscapes that reveals their mystical charge, of providing substance to his image, of composing a universe that is carefully studied, singular, constructed and yet still realistic, matches Lotfi’s aesthetic project.”

Producer Daoud of Tunisia’s APA (Artistes Producteurs Associés) and her longtime collaborator Sébastien Hussenot of France’s La Luna Productions put together an international co-production package that includes Gwennaëlle Libert of Belgium’s Versus Production, and Edyta Janczak-Hiriart and Joanna Symanska of Poland’s Shipsboy. The film’s concept was developed in and supported by festival platforms including the Chabaka Program in Carthage, the Cinegouna Platform, the Beirut Cinema Platform a