A poignant story of adolescence in the realist tradition.
One hot and stormy summer by a popular lake, seventeen-year-old Purdey and her younger brother Makenzy walk the line between experiencing adolescence, finding love and fending for themselves. While Purdey works as a cleaner in a hotel complex, Makenzy earns money by robbing tourists. With a fractured home life leaving them to their own devices, they must learn to support each other in a surprisingly tender journey that chronicles what feels like the last summer of their youth.
With unflinching camerawork and a realist sensibility, this is a poignant coming-of-age drama about family, class, and connection in the cinema vérité tradition. Absorbing performances from real-life siblings Purdey and Makenzy lend an earnest gravitas to Paloma Sermon-Daï’s observational style.
“Combining a familiar ‘last summer’ coming-of-age story with a non-fiction sensibility to arresting affect, the filmmaker’s intimate visual style effectively draws the viewer into the sealed-off world of the troubled protagonists of this Cannes Critics Week title.”
Nikki Baughan Screen Daily 19/05/2023
French Touch Prize of the Jury, La Semaine de la Critique 2023, 2023, af
Paloma Sermon-Daï
Born 1993 in Namur, Paloma Sermon-Daï is a Belgian director and writer. She studied film at the Haute Ecole Libre de Bruxelles, where her student film Makenzy was selected at the Visions du Réel in 2017. Her documentary Petit Samedi premiered at the 2020 Berlinale Forum and won numerous awards, including the Bayard d’Or at Namur IFF and Best Documentary at the Athens International Film Festival. It’s Raining in the House is her first feature.
