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CANNES 2021 Award

How to Have Sex wins the Next Step Award in Cannes

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- CANNES 2021: The project from British filmmaker Molly Manning Walker has won Critics’ Week’s Next Step Award

How to Have Sex wins the Next Step Award in Cannes
Director Molly Manning Walker

Since 2014, the Cannes Film Festival’s Critics’ Week accompanies its talents from short to feature-length film through its Next Step programme. But the workshop, offered every year to laureates (read the news on their latest selection of filmmakers), also organises since 2019 a competition to reward one of them. This year, it’s the British project How to Have Sex [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Molly Manning Walker
film profile
]
by Molly Manning Walker, produced by Wild Swim Films, which has been crowned winner.

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The recognised director of photography on several short films, Molly Manning Walker moved to directing with the short Good Thanks, You?, presented at the 59th Critics’ Week and which depicted the ghastly red tape that sexual assault victims must endure, but also the struggle to convey the unspeakable to their loved ones. With How to Have Sex, the filmmaker continues her exploration of sexual violence with a dive into a typically British rite of passage where young women spend their holidays in Mallorca to lose their virginity during origiastic parties. We follow the journey of three friends, Zara, Em and Sky, who will face the dynamics of mimicry and of peer pressure.

By seizing on an endemic phenomenon in the United Kingdom, Manning Walker aims to account for both the ritualised violence of teenage sexuality, but also for the intimacy and solidarity of female friendship. Using her experience as a DoP of both fiction and documentaries, How to Have Sex will blend the naturalistic truthfulness of the cast and situations together with formal ambition. The director will thus capture both the vitality of youth and the normalisation of the tourist aesthetic, in the footsteps of photographer Martin Parr.

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(Translated from French)

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