Nowhere Special

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

The film is loosely inspired by a real case Pasolini came across in a 2011 BBC Radio 4 documentary, and he wrote the screenplay alone. James Norton (known for Happy Valley and McMafia) is paired with the four-year-old Daniel Lamont, in his screen debut, with Eileen O'Higgins, Valene Kane and Stella McCusker in support. It was shot by Marius Panduru, the Romanian cinematographer of Călin Peter Netzer's Child's Pose (2013) and Cristian Mungiu's Graduation (2016); the Romanian, British and Italian co-production behind it is what allowed the film to be made on a small art-house budget.

It 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. Norton received a BIFA nomination for Best Actor, and Lamont one for Breakthrough Performance. Pasolini keeps returning to working-class British protagonists in extreme circumstances (the line runs back to Still Life seven years earlier), and his work has become a regular point of reference in academic writing on British social realism, next to the late films of Mike Leigh and Ken Loach.