Camerimage Film Festival: ‘Emilia Pérez,’ ‘The Girl With the Needle’ and ‘The Fire Inside’ to Screen in Competition

The EnergaCamerimage International Film Festival has revealed the first set of films for its 2024 main competition – three works that take daring aesthetic approaches to tales about women. 

Controlling partners are Jacques Audiard’s Cannes jury prize winner Emilia Pérez, Magnus von Horn’s arthouse drama The Girl with the Needle, and Rachel Morrison’s boxing biopic The Fire Inside. It is from Camerimage’s tradition that we have not been informed of the remaining competition selection that typically comprises approximately twelve movies; the remaining part of this year’s competition selection will be released in the next few days. 

As we have reported before, this year’s Camerimage competition will be evaluated by a jury composed of chair Cate Blanchett – the two-time Oscar winner. 

Emilia Pérez’s movie and The Girl with the Needle both debuted at Cannes in May — and both movies were named by THR’s critics as some of the best of the 2024 Cannes edition. 

“Zoe Saldaña, Selena Gomez and the divine Karla Sofia Gascón light up Audiard’s fabulous musical in which a Mexican drug lord enlists the help of a lawyer to undergo gender-affirming surgery and start a new life,” wrote THR‘s lead critic David Rooney in his sum-up of Emilia Pérez, continuing: “The French director (A Prophet, Rust and Bone) has always been adventurous, and his latest creation dexterously spans styles: It’s a redemption narrative with a current of Almodóvarian humor, moments of melodrama, noir, social realism, a hint of telenovela camp and an escalation into suspense touched by tragedy.”

Of The Girl with the Needle, THR critic Leslie Felperin said: In von Horn’s piercingly sad and urgently timely drama, Vic Carmen Sonne gives the sort of richly textured, quivery-edged, idiosyncratic performance that can only should be described as full-blooded for a seamstress who is left to the mercy of a wealthy lover in the aftermath of getting her pregnant only to jilt her for not marrying her in post World War I Copenhagen. That leaves her with two choices: either jam knitting needle into her cervix to abort the pregnancy on her own, or allow the baby to be taken away from her by a wicked woman (the great Trine Dyrholm), who uses a cramped, dingy house as the clinic for adoption. Such is the case with the film that rises to a terrible denouement. 

The script for The Fire Inside was penned by Barry Jenkins of Moonlight fame and the movie is the directorial bow of cinematographer Rachel Morrison. The film was being buzzed at this year’s Toronto festival and, speaking of this screener, THR ‘s reviewer noted that the film is: “an immersive, pull-no-punches dramatic account of the ascendancy of Claressa Shields, the Flint, Michigan, Black teen who would become the only American boxer, male or female, in the history of the sport to win back-to-back gold medals at the Olympic Games.”

Camerimage 2024 will be launched on November 16 by a movie by Steve McQueen’s World War II drama Blitz. More announced features are a tribute to star of Shogun Hiroyuki Sanada and a world premiere of the indie western Rust starring Alec Baldwin. The first screening of Rust will be followed by a panel discussion to pay a laconic tribute to Halyna Hutchins, a cinematographer who died at the scene in the course of this film. Camerimage traditionally targets results in the art of motion picture photography. She and her fellow jurors will help to reveal the winners of the festival’s Golden Frog prizes in November 23rd.