Ursula Meier is making a major mark at this year’s Locarno Film Festival. The fest just signed a gender parity pledge for which she’s credited as the Godmother, and now word comes that the French-Swiss director’s latest project was announced in Locarno and has received a major grant. Variety reports that Meier will make her English-language debut with drama-thriller “Quiet Land.”
Set in Montana, the pic tells the story of an aging cop. While “photographing automobile accidents with an old Reflex camera, [he] comes to team up with a pugnacious woman in a desperate quest for justice – though the cop begins to ask whether the ‘web of crime’ he has stumbled on is fruit of his paranoid imagination and onset of age,” the source summarizes.
Meier hinted that the film “depicts the fight of an old and freedom-loving America against a younger America which has become a slave to money.” She’s writing the script with Michel Caulea.
Produced by Switzerland’s Bandita Films, France’s Cinéfacture, and U.S.-based Animal Kingdom Films, “Quiet Land” will mark Meier’s third feature. She previously helmed “Home” and “Sister,” and co-directed “Bridges of Sarajevo” alongside over a dozen others.
“Quiet Land” won a $1 million grant from Suissimage yesterday at Locarno. Backed by the Swiss authors’ rights collection society, the grant targets women filmmakers.
Meier served as president of the Caméra d’or Jury at Cannes this year.
