Cavedweller

Colour, 35 mm
USA, 2004, 120 min
Section: Official Selection

Synopsis

Delia is a nervy, sensitive middle-aged woman who doesn’t seem to have had much joy out of life. Years before, she had run away from a man who used to beat her and had threatened to kill her several times; her second marriage to a rock singer ended with his death in a car accident while he was travelling with his lover. There is not much now to keep her in California and, taking her reluctant 11-year-old daughter Cissy with her, she decides to return home to Georgia. But nothing is ever that easy. Many years ago Delia had abandoned her two small daughters and now she has to encounter contempt from the inhabitants of the provincial town, accusations from her husband who, gravely ill and abandoned, is dying in his dilapidated house, the hatred of her mother-in-law who is bringing up the girls and doesn’t want to hand them back to Delia, with Cissy’s depression as the girl can’t stand the new environment and, above all, she has to face total alienation and lack of trust on the part of her two adolescent daughters.

About the director

Lisa Cholodenko (1964) studied film at Columbia University and began her career in 1990 in Los Angeles where she became a member of the Editors’ Guild. She has worked on a number of films, among them Used People and To Die For (dir. Gus Van Sant). Her feature debut High Art (screened in Karlovy Vary in 1999) is an independent American production and brought her immediate fame in independent circles. Before making her latest film Cavedweller (2003), an adaptation of the novel of the same name by Dorothy Allison, she directed the successful film Laurel Canyon; shown last year at Karlovy Vary. She also works frequently in television.