“And the Oscar goes to . . . Charlotte Wells.” One year ago the idea that an unknown Edinburgh film-maker could be in the running for cinema’s greatest award would be a dream conjured up in . . . well, Hollywood. Yet this month, on Tuesday, January 24, the dream could come one step closer when the Oscar nominees for 2023 are announced.
One year ago, Wells was ensconced in an editing room, struggling to mould her debut film, Aftersun, into shape for submission to the Cannes Film Festival. Last month The Hollywood Reporter, the film industry’s bible, tipped both the film and Wells as a “major threat” to frontrunners and favourites such as Steven Spielberg’s The Fabelmans.
The magazine’s executive editor for awards, Scott Feinberg, has said Wells has a strong chance of receiving nominations for both best director and best original screenplay. Paul Mescal, the Irish actor who plays the lead role, is a “frontrunner” for best actor, he said, while his 11-year-old co-star, Frankie Corio as Sophie, is a possible nominee for best supporting actress.
So how did a small, low-budget film about a Scottish father’s holiday with his daughter at a resort in Turkey become such a critical smash?
Wells’s love of film and film-making was encouraged when as a teenager she joined the Edinburgh Filmhouse’s movie-making group SKAMM (Scottish Kids Are Making Movies) which was set up by Mark Cousins and Shiona Wood as a way to emphasise creativity over training. This, combined with a £9.99 monthly pass to Cineworld, provided her early education in film and by the age of 14 she stood up in her English class and announced that she wanted to be a director.
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Wells would go on to study classics at King’s College London and then work in financial services before deciding in her mid-twenties to study film at New York University. Her original plan was to become a producer, but the course stipulated that each student had to make a short film and, once in the director’s chair, Wells was reluctant to leave.
The idea of a film about a young daughter’s holiday with her father was rooted in Wells’s personal experience. As the director recently wrote: “Aftersun is a personal film. Most films are, of course, but this film more than most. This film is unmistakably fiction, but within it is a truth that is mine.
“A photograph of my dad and of me — the starting point for this project — each a single shot because photos of us both are in short supply in that pre-selfie era. I am 10 or 11, Sophie’s age in the film. My Dad is 31 or 32, a little younger than I am now. We happen to be in Turkey.”
Wells worked on the screenplay for a number of years before filming during the second Covid summer of 2021. Corio was picked from more than 800 young actors, while Mescal made his name in Normal People, the TV adaptation of Sally Rooney’s novel that became a phenomenon during the spring lockdown of 2020.
As a Scottish female film director Wells also included a subtle nod to those who helped forge the way. In a shot of a stack of books, there is a title by Margaret Tait, one of the first Scottish women to make a feature film, Blue Black Permanent. Tait, an Orcadian who died in 1999, said: “The kind of cinema I care about is at the level of poetry — in fact it has been in a way my life’s work making film poems.” An apt description of Wells’s film.
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Aftersun received a two-minute standing ovation at Cannes, where it won a jury prize and has been racking up awards ever since, including seven at the British Independent Film Awards.
Will Wells go all the way? Only time and Academy voters will tell.
Aftersun is being shown today in 35mm at the Cameo cinema in Edinburgh and is available to view on demand at MUBI from January 6.
