Beyond the Horizon 2019 with English Subtitles

Description

Beyond the Horizon 2019
Le milieu de l’horizon (original title)
1h 30min | Drama | 7 February 2020 (Canada)

Storyline:

Summer 1976. Europe is undergoing a relentless heatwave and one of the worst droughts in its history. On his parents’ farm, Gus (13) spends his vacation reading comic books, helping his father who has invested his entire savings in a modern battery henhouse, and running free with Mado, the wild child from the village. But slowly around him, his reassuring and familiar universe starts to crack under the heat… His mother, always a tender and gentle presence, begins drifting away, spending more and more time with the mesmerizing Cxc3xa9cile, while his father finds himself alone to fight the ravage of the drought. Witnessing the destruction of his nuclear family, traditional farming and patriarchy, Gus has to grow up fast and quickly leave behind the innocence of his childhood…

User review:

There is a new nugget of young actor (Luc Bruchez ) , Laetitia Casta, but also the very talented Thibaut Evrard, already seen in the successful Swiss series “Double vie”.

The middle of the horizon is an adaptation of a novel of the same name by Roland Buti which retraces, for a summer, the beginnings of the adolescence of Gus, a young boy from a peasant family. We get involved in his daily tasks on the farm, his bike trips and his first emotions with the village girl.

At the same time, we are experiencing this scorching summer of 1976 rather than enjoying it. It is so hot that hens and cattle are dying day after day. The tension mounts both in the vacillating business of the farm, and under the wide-eyed gaze of Gus, witness of an emerging love passion between his mother and a friend (radiant Clxc3xa9mence Poxc3xa9sy ) . Therein lies the central core of the film. The revelation of this secret will change the strong relationships that bind him to his mother and the whole family balance will be upset.

However, the film leaves us hungry, as if several important subjects have not been completed. It also releases this omnipresent discomfort which is only growing. But what the director undeniably manages to transmit is a certain form of modernity by showing the freedom to be able to choose who you are, who you want to be, without worrying about what others think. It makes the viewer sensitive to several questions: how, in such a remote agricultural environment, and at such a time can we react to the sexual orientation of a mother? Could we accept it better in 2019?

Director: Delphine Lehericey
Writers: Roland Buti (book), Joanne Giger (screenplay)
Stars: Clxc3xa9mence Poxc3xa9sy, Laetitia Casta, Fred Hotier
Country: Switzerland | Belgium
Language: French
Release Date: 7 February 2020 (Canada)
Also Known As: Beyond the Horizon
Filming Locations: Bitola, Macedonia