Holy Rosita by Wannes Destoop (Belgium 2024) is good independent cinema and tells a different story.
The film has been awarded Best Feature Film at 42th Torino Film Festival.
duration: 90’
In his first feature film, the young Flemish director tells us about the right to happiness even for people who are “not approved” by society.
The director has often explored the theme of fatphobia, and with Holy Rosita he has the bravery to foreground a female hero of a type we do not often see on screen, an obese young woman.
The director shows us Rosita while benevolently selling her generous, enveloping body to a few regulars. She is a vulnerable young woman living on the margins of society; she is kind of a sex worker, but she also regularly works for an industrial laundry that welcomes protected category employees.
Rosita has a dream that has so far been denied her: to become a mother.
Wannes Destoop portrays the hindered life of a woman whose body is controlled by others: by family and society. But Rosita at some point takes charge of her destiny, addressing everything that has always been presented to her as “unfeasible in her condition,”and inappropriate; and goes so far as to conceal her desired pregnancy in order to carry it to term.
Rosita has a childish soul; in fact, her best friend is 8 years old. She plays with her and plays like her; those moments of freedom make her forget the daily constraints and precariousness.
Rosita has a tortured soul, a traumatic relationship with her mother who abandoned her in an orphanage many years ago, and Rosita has been estranged from her. Rosita's determination to have a child is motivated by the urge to prove she can be a better mother than her own mother was.
The main character is played by actress Daphne Agten.
The actress told me a little anecdote: the body fat created with prosthetics for this role and mostly her big pregnant belly sits on top of the closet in her home as a relic of the demanding makeup work necessary to create the character.
“My love for the marginalised people is the main reason I want to tell stories and make films.” declares the Flemish director ”I want to shine a light on contexts and people who too often remain in the shadows and whom the average citizen judges without really knowing what lies behind them. With Holy Rosita, I wanted to tell a moving and hopeful story, a story of mothers and children, of vulnerable souls who are labeled as outcasts of society, but who are nonetheless entitled to happiness.”
Wannes Destoop debuted in 2010 with Badpakje 46, (Swimsuit 46), a beautiful short film he made as a graduation project, which won the Jury Prize at the Cannes Film Festival and 13 other awards around the world.
It is the story of a twelve-year-old girl, Chantal, who is very overweight and struggles against the disdain of the surrounding world, starting with the not-so-subtle contempt she receives even from her own mother. The pre-adolescent girl devotes herself with passion and seriousness to competitive swimming. The director's themes are the body, identity, vulnerability, and the right for a different person to succeed in what they do, to have the support of their family and society, and to not be bullied or sabotaged.
In Holy Rosita, we will find the same themes, already evident in embryo in this very first work. It is a reflection on personal growth, and a tribute to the inner strength of someone who, despite the difficulties, never stops searching for their place in society and in their family.
The director then participated in Torino Film Lab projects in their SeriesLab TV program. It was 2018 and the director worked on the TV series Albatros for a year. Albatros was launched in 2020 and distributed internationally by Wild Bunch TV. It received excellent reviews and won the 2021 Prix Europa for Best European Fiction TV Series.
He developed Holy Rosita with TorinoFilmLab again, during the pandemic, therefore from a distance.
the Flemish director Wannes Destoop
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