Nowhere Special

Uberto Pasolini's Nowhere Special premiered in the Orizzonti competition at the 77th Venice International Film Festival in September 2020. Pasolini — an Italian-born British producer-director who had spent the 1990s and 2000s producing such films as The Full Monty (1997) before turning to direction with Machan (2008) and Still Life (2013) — is the great-nephew of Luchino Visconti and a long-time figure in British independent cinema.

The film is loosely inspired by a real case Pasolini had read about in a 2011 BBC Radio 4 documentary. The screenplay is by Pasolini alone. The cast pairs James Norton — known for Happy Valley and McMafia — with the four-year-old Daniel Lamont in his screen debut, with Eileen O'Higgins, Valene Kane and Stella McCusker in supporting roles. Cinematography is by Marius Panduru, the Romanian DP who had shot Călin Peter Netzer's Child's Pose (2013) and Cristian Mungiu's Graduation (2016) — part of the Romanian-UK-Italian co-production structure that allowed the film to be made on a small art-house budget.

The film won the Audience Award at the Valladolid International Film Festival (Seminci) in 2020 and the Best Film prize in the International Competition at the Pula Film Festival in 2021. James Norton received a BIFA nomination for Best Actor, with Daniel Lamont nominated for Breakthrough Performance. Pasolini's interest in working-class British protagonists facing extreme circumstances — a continuity from Still Life seven years earlier — has made his work a regular reference point in academic studies of British social realism alongside the late films of Mike Leigh and Ken Loach.