SWEETIE
Australia / 1989 / 97 min / DCP / VOSTF / Comedy Drama
Director : Jane Campion
Script : Gerard Lee, Jane Campion
Cinematography : Sally Bongers
Music : Martin Armiger
Editing : Veronika Jenet
Production : Billy MacKinnon, John Maynard
Cast : Karen Colston, Genevieve Lemon, Tom Lycos, Jon Darling, Dorothy Barry
Cannes Film Festival 1989
Introduced by Jane Campion
Opening film
Kay visits a fortune teller who tells her that she will soon meet the man of her life she will recognize thanks to a mark on his face. Fortunately, she does not wait for a long time because Louis, who has just become engaged to one of her colleagues, has this mark on the face. Kay convinces Louis that their love is predestined. For a while, the couple gets along well. One evening, they find in their apartment Kay's sister, Sweetie, who decided to come to say hello to her sister. Sweetie, from her childhood on, has always been the preferred girl in the family. She vainly tried, since, to come through in the show business. Sweetie is fat and suffers apparently from a light mental disorder which is the cause of scenes of fury and hysteria that her family bears with philosophy
Jane Campion
Jane Campion was born in Wellington, New Zealand, and now lives in Sydney, Australia. After training as a painter in Australia, Campion studied filmmaking attending the Australian School of Film and Television. Her first short film, Peel (1982) won the Palme D'Or at the Cannes Film Festival in 1986. Her other short films include Passionless Moments (1983), A Girl's Own Story (1986), and the telefeature 2 Friends (1986), all of which won Australian and international awards. Her first theatrical feature, Sweetie (1989) was selected in Cannes Film Festival. It was followed by the successful An Angel at My Table (1990; originally produced for New Zealand television), which was based on autobiographies by Janet Frame for which she won an Academy Award for best original screenplay and which won some seven prizes, including the Silver Lion at the Venice Film Festival in 1990. The 19th-century love story that she wrote and directed The Piano (1993) won the Palme D'Or at Cannes, making her the first woman ever to win the prestigious award. Campion’s subsequent films include The Portrait of a Lady (1996), an adaptation of the novel by Henry James; Holy Smoke (1999), a dramedy that examines spiritual awakenings and deprogrammers; and the thriller In the Cut (2003). In 2009 Campion earned accolades for Bright Star, which chronicles the romance between poet John Keats and Fanny Brawne. She later co-wrote and codirected the eerie TV series Top of the Lake (2013 & 2017), which centres on a female detective.