Northwest Film Forum

Nan Goldin collaborator Valerie Massadian’s directorial debut stars a four year old.  “There's not one word, one gesture—nothing—that I imposed on her. We played,” she told Craig Hubert of Interview Magazine. Toddler  actor Kelyna Lecomte plays Nana, a girl abandoned by her mother on the outskirts of her grandfather’s pig farm.  Filmed with a voyeuristic distance, Nana unfolds in the allowed space as the character’s isolation endows her own developing independence. Audiences are given an innocently intimate, contemplative glimpse of the world as Nana views it. Played with extraordinary composure, the character of Nana is a quiet delight to watch.  Winner of the Best First Film prize at the Locarno Film Festival, this is a sweet, life-affirming faux-fairytale, simultaneously enchanting and elegiac.

>> Want to learn more about the process of making Nana? Director Valerie Massadian hosts an afternoon class at the Film Forum on January 12.

"Actress Kelyna Lecomte has the rare gift of never being boring...Nana illustrates the extent to which children live in self-made, half-imaginary worlds of their own." -Seattle Weekly

"the light...sounds...and patterns slowly transfix and encompass you until you're under Nana's spell." -The Stranger 

"a quiet and often lovely film, scored only with sounds of the forest (which we see, as Nana does, as a magical place) and the wind, letting a child make her own story." -Seattle Times