Somersault

Sixteen-year-old Heidi is caught kissing her mother's boyfriend, runs from home and ends up in a ski town in the Australian Alps in the middle of winter. She takes a motel room, finds work at a petrol station and looks for love in everyone she meets. What she mostly finds is sex, and she does not know how to tell the two apart. The film is not about sexuality but about hunger for touch. Heidi holds strangers' hands, hugs people, collects gloves, and the director builds this through skin and light rather than dialogue. The boy she meets, Joe, cannot say who he is on his own father's farm, and two silences do not cure each other. Cate Shortland's first feature. Abbie Cornish plays Heidi and Sam Worthington plays Joe; both were made by this film. The result set a record at home: it won thirteen of the thirteen categories it was nominated in at the 2004 AFI Awards, including film, director, actress and actor. The previous record was eight. It had screened at Cannes in Un Certain Regard. Who it is for: anyone who likes quiet cinema built on adolescence and loneliness. Who it is not for: anyone looking for plot. The narrative is deliberately loose, some scenes are uncomfortable, and the film offers no resolution.