Cate Shortland will helm an adaptation of Rachel Seiffert’s Booker Prize winning novel, “The Dark Room.”
“Lore,” as it’s titled, follows the story of the 14-year-old titular character who is left alone in charge of her four young siblings after her Nazi parents are captured after the German front collapses. The siblings then embark on a 900 kilometer journey across the country to get to their grandmother’s house.
The film will be Shortland’s long awaited follow up to 2004’s poignant and vastly underrated coming-of-age tale “Somersault” which featured in the Un Certain Regard section of the Cannes Film Festival that year and swept the Australian Film Institute’s awards winning 13 out of 15 awards. Its leads, Sam Worthington and Abbie Cornish, who were a part of that awards-domination, have also since gone on to become certified stars in Hollywood after breaking out with James Cameron’s “Avatar” and Jane Campion’s “Bright Star.” The film boasts some wonderfully expressive aesthetics too including a wonderfully somnambulant soundtrack by Aussie gauze-dreamers Decoder Ring and lensing right out of the Sofia Coppola/Lynne Ramsay school of visuals.
Backed by the likes of Rohfilm, Edge City Films, Porchlight Films and KGP, “Lore” is currently in pre-production with delivery to its newly-announced distributors, Memento Films International, set for the spring of 2011. While not perfect (it can be kinda melodramatic in spots), “Sommersault” was still an auspicious piece of work (it probably features Worthington’s most non-wooden performance to date, with a mullet to boot!) and we look forward to more of Shortland’s unique brand of cinema. Here’s the “Sommersault” trailer if you missed the picture back in ’04.