In connection with the Stockholm International Film Festival, long feature film debutant Léa Mysius visited the Swedish capital presenting her film Ava and Your Living City had the chance to converse with her about directing and about having such a successful breakthrough with Ava.
The film is also featured as the face of this year’s festival, om posters and other material. Ava shows us that teenage rebellion can take on many different forms. The headstrong title character of the movie is only thirteen years old and spends her summer at a seaside town. She doesn’t hold back when it comes to criticizing the lifestyle of her sexually adventurous mother. While disgusted at her mother’s relationship with a younger man, Ava herself begins to pursue an even less conventional romantic interest – an outcast boy with a black dog. Together they form an outlaw couple and stray further and further away from the norms of society. Furthermore Ava’s dwindling eyesight complicates her “summer of love”. As a sort of comment on the darkness to come, the analogue cinematography is vibrantly colourful – a celebration of all the beautiful things that Ava will soon have to live without. Increasingly coming to terms with her affliction however, our heroine shows us that you don’t have to have perfect eyesight in order to be truly alive.
