90 MINUTES: Director Profile: Eva Sørhaug

Eva Sørhaug's 2008 feature debut, Cold Lunch, played at the Toronto International Film Festival in 2008. This challenging film was nominated for the Bronze Horse at the Stockholm Film Festival and won the Grand Jury Prize for Best Film at the Rouen Nordic Film Festival.

Clearly Cold Lunch is not a show on the Food Network. So what is it? 

Cineuropa describes Sørhaug's "remarkable feature debut" like this: "With its classic but unpredictable plot, Cold Lunch retraces—in six chapters—the lives of five people in a residential area of Oslo over the course of 48 hours. The five 'cold stories' are all subtly interlinked."

The Eternal Sunshine of the Logical Mind blog has more insights, saying, "while not a happy fun time at the cinema, [Cold Lunch] offered surprises and an austere but strangely lovely look and feel."

Fringe Report raves about the film, explaining that Cold Lunch is a ""powerful, funny and gentle study of extreme human manipulation" that is "made up of the awful games people play repetitively to achieve the upper hand in the sad cruel components of the day." It's a film that "sways between the extremely sinister . . . to the stunningly gentle."

Austere, lovely, sinister, and funny. All adjectives that both complement and comprise the films of the Vanguard programme. But who is Eva Sørhaug?

According to the Norwegian Film Institute, Sørhaug received her Bachelors Degree in social sciences from the University of Oslo and her M.F.A. in film making from the San Francisco Academy of Art University. Plus she attended the Stockholm Academy of Dramatic Arts for one year.

Perhaps her education in Norway and the United States both contribute to Sørhaug's studied, analytical approach to the characters in her films as well as their Hitchcockian elements. Cold Lunch pays homage to The Birds in visual, narrative, and ultimately shocking ways.

You can see traces of Cold Lunch in the trailer for Sorhaug's 90 Minutes, a film which she wrote, directed, and produced. Soft shades of grey, rose, ice blue, and cream contrast with sharp angles and extreme close-ups. The lyrical pacing of the images in the beginning of the clip gives way to brief glimpses of violence.

This year's Festival is proud to present the World Premiere of Eva Sørhaug's uncompromising sophomore feature film, 90 Minutes.

90 MINUTES Screening Times:

Sat., Sept. 8^th 9:00PM CINEPLEX YONGE & DUNDAS 2

Sun., Sept. 9^th 9:00AM CINEPLEX YONGE & DUNDAS 10

Sun., Sept. 16^th 11:45AM CINEPLEX YONGE & DUNDAS 2