Three New Faces to Watch This Awards Season

Awards season has not officially begun, but the early festival selections have already identified three names that are generating serious attention. Here is what you need to know.

Liora Vasquez, Director

Vasquez’s debut feature, Below the Salt Line, was shot on a shoestring budget in her hometown on the Portuguese coast with a cast of mostly non-professional actors. The result — a slow-burn drama about a fishing community confronting the arrival of a luxury resort developer — has drawn comparisons to the European social realism of the nineteen-seventies, though Vasquez herself resists the label.

“I just filmed my neighbours,” she has said. “They are more interesting than any script I could write.”

The film has been selected for competition at two major autumn festivals, and acquisition offers are reportedly already on the table. Vasquez, who is twenty-eight and until last year was working as a secondary school teacher, has handled the attention with a composure that belies her inexperience.

Soren Lindqvist, Composer

Lindqvist’s score for The Cartographer’s Wife — a period drama that premiered at a spring festival to enthusiastic reviews — is being described as the most original film music in years. Trained as a classical cellist, Lindqvist composed the entire score using only acoustic instruments recorded in the same locations where the film was shot: churches, kitchens, the hull of a wooden boat.

The result has a textured, organic quality that dissolves the boundary between music and ambient sound. In several sequences, it is impossible to tell where the score ends and the world of the film begins — which is, Lindqvist says, exactly the point.

Ayo Okafor, Actor

Okafor nearly left acting entirely after a string of roles she describes as “the best friend, the supportive colleague, the woman who exists so the protagonist has someone to talk to.” She was six months into retraining as an architect when director Maren Schultz offered her the lead in Iron Seeds, a family saga spanning three decades in a West African coastal city.

The performance — commanding, physically transformative, and spanning ages twenty-two to fifty-five — is being discussed as the breakout of the year. Okafor, characteristically, deflects the praise.

“I had nothing to lose,” she says. “I had already quit. So I could be completely fearless, because the worst thing that could happen was going back to architecture. And architecture is not so bad.”

Festival premieres for all three projects are scheduled for September and October. Full profiles will appear in the autumn issue of Vanity Lane.