Venice Silver Lion Winner Théo Court on CineMart-Bound ‘Tres Noches Negras’

variety.com:

Christopher Vourlias Spanish-Chilean filmmaker Théo Court is prepping the follow-up to his Venice prize-winner “White on White,” which won the Silver Lion for best director in the festival’s Horizons strand in 2019, and was Chile’s submission in the best international feature film Oscar race this year.Court spoke exclusively to Variety about “Tres Noches Negras,” which he’ll be presenting during the Rotterdam Film Festival’s CineMart co-production market this week.Set in the Chilean countryside, the film tells the story of a peasant who asks the devil to grant him a wish beneath a full moon.

A young Haitian man soon appears dead on the grounds of the mansion that looms over the peasant’s feudal, rural community, setting off an investigation that will unravel the complex social and human fabric of modern-day Chile. “Tres Noches Negras” is deeply inspired by the central Chilean region where Court was raised after spending the first 15 years of his life in Spain. “It has always been for me a magical place, coming from Madrid, a place where I could learn to cope well with loneliness and find an inner identity,” he said.A moody, evocative region “of changing seasons, constant rain, mud, deaths, suicides, family, childhood, faces, forgetting,” it is also where Court “grew up artistically.”“There appeared for me cinema, poetry, art, and also the possibility to look at my own environment as a foreigner and question it,” he said.