Nothing Personal

Showing at the Mar del Plata Film Festival: Nothing Personal, directed by Urszula Antoniak

Synopsis from the festival's website:

A girl looks out the window of her apartment in Amsterdam. Her belongings are downstairs, on the street. All alone in the empty room, Anne -that’s her name- takes her ring off: this is the first scene of Nothing Personal and that’s all the information we’ll receive about Anne’s past because Antoniak´s first film focuses exclusively on Anne’s journey to faraway lands. The place chosen by Anne for her intimate exile is Connemara, an inhospitable district on the west coast of Ireland. We see her walking like an unsociable vagabond through the roads of this austere landscape, searching for food in the garbage and baring her teeth to those who try to disturb her solitude. But then she meets Martin, a widow who is much older than her but equally determined to defend his isolation. She agrees to work for him in exchange for food and something begins to change in Anne’s interior. Using very few dialogues and taking full advantage of the enigmatic beauty of the Irish landscape, Antoniak finds the precise tone and rhythm to portray Anne’s transformation and the chemistry between Rea (Neil Jordan’s fetish actor) and the fantastic actress Lotte Verbeek, the great discovery of Nothing Personal. When our contemporary world is busy with issues of unification and integration, the two characters of Nothing Personal choose a solitude they see as personal freedom and comfort. But isn’t they longing for human contact? What are the stages of coming together of two people? Nothing Personal is a cinematic experience asking and answering these questions.

The film's website is here.