'Ditectrice' | The Film from Guilherme Santos and Sadaf H. Nava at Cannes

Ditectrice, directed by Guilherme Santos and Sadaf H. Nava, sees its screening at Cannes tomorrow, July 16th.

The rise of female-centric cinema is a long-awaited blessing, as is this short. In recent years Iran, home to director Sadaf H. Nava, has seen a blooming film industry of new creators where they previously were not. Over the past 20 years, the nation has been hailed as a capital for exceedingly unique auteur cinema, becoming an unexpected film hot spot. Brazil, with a rocky and often politically threatened film industry, has produced a crop of filmmakers through the last century. It, by no coincidence, is the birthplace of the other director of this film, Guilherme Santos.

The film is made up of a series of vignettes that follow an introspective young woman. The scenes aren’t necessarily tied to one another in the classic narrative sense, only deceptively incoherent. Instead the chapter-like scenes are bridged together by the palpable and raw presence of Sadaf H. Nava, who also plays the protagonist. The footage is overlaid with prose-like narration that gives the film the poignancy it relies on. Lines like “God only appears in the desert” and “Those that invest in fiction have a better grasp on reality” stick in your mind long after the tableaus have come to an end.

Ditectrice will be hit the screen at Cannes film festival tomorrow, screening simultaneously on SHOWstudio. To learn more about these two artists and their upcoming work, visit Nava and Santos online.