Carolina Markowicz’s dark satire “Charcoal,” which world premieres on Sept. 11 at Toronto Film Festival, has debuted its teaser trailer with Variety (below). World sales are being handled by Urban Sales.
The film, which plays in the festival’s Platform section, centers on a poor family living in a remote area in Brazil, who earn a pittance from their charcoal business. When a shady nurse asks them to host a mysterious foreigner they accept. The home soon becomes a hideout as the so-called guest happens to be a highly wanted drug lord. The mother, her husband and child will have to learn how to share the same roof with this stranger, while keeping up appearances of an unchanged peasant routine.
Diana Cadavid at Toronto Film Festival commented: “For her unsettlingly precise feature-film debut, writer-director Carolina Markowicz blends biting social commentary on the pervasive forces that prey on the least fortunate and an acute sensibility for deadpan comedy of a very dark kind, making us question the limits of the absurd. The subtly shifting points of view often take us back to little Jean, whose cold and witty analysis of the situation amplifies the disturbing motifs that lie at the heart of this bizarre story.”
The film stars Brazil’s Maeve Jinkings (“Aquarius,” “Neon Bull”), Argentina’s César Bordon (“Wild Tales,” “The Headless Woman”), and Brazil’s Camila Márdila (“The Second Mother”).
The producers are Zita Carvalhosa, Karen Castanho and Alejandro Israel, and the production companies are Superfilms, Biônica Filmes and Ajimolido Films.
Markowicz is a screenwriter and director based in São Paulo, Brazil. Her short films have won many international awards and have played in more than 200 festivals worldwide including Toronto, SXSW and Directors’ Fortnight in Cannes, where she won the Queer Palm for “The Orphan.”