Charlotte Wells On Her Feature Debut 'Aftersun': 'It Became Personal'

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If they want to, they’ll overlook the character’s every positive action in favor of arriving at that interpretation. I occasionally see Aftersun being described as a story of an estranged father and daughter. I don’t know what more I could’ve done to convince them otherwise. Perhaps there’s no winning for people who want to see a positive depiction of fathers. As an adult and a mother, Sophie now knew what it was to be a parent.

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Charlotte Wells might have heard me weeping at the premiere of her film. “There was someone behind me crying quite audibly,” says the Scottish director, who was still putting the finishing touches to her feature debut, Aftersun, when it crash-landed at Cannes back in May. She’s been forced to play grief counsellor to scores of traumatised viewers ever since. I have a torso on an hour’s worth of digital video playing chess. All of our heads are framed out of screen because the chess board is more interesting. My generation has more than the generation before, and this current generation record more than ever.

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Aftersun charts the exquisite, bittersweet journey of seeing a parent as their own person.

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If we’re lucky to grow up with parents or close guardians, we build our portraits of them first in broad strokes of primary color. They’re defined in relation to us; they’re the most important adults in our still-small world. We stop depending on them; we grow up—maybe even face some of the same challenges they did. And yet, envisioning who they were without us can still be difficult. Another moment from the Jubilee celebrations saw Charlotte encourage her little brother to stop waving as they headed to Horse Guards Parade for Trooping the Colour. Louis was very excited to greet members of the public from their carriage but was interrupted by his elder sister, who pushed his hand down as his excitable waves peaked in speed.

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But that’s the kind of question that will become informed by every viewer’s own life experience. Wells, who has received a DGA nomination for first-time feature directing, crafted an intimate yet ambitious memory film about a young father and his daughter making the most of their shared time together. “Be gentle with me,” she seemed to be saying, but a little under two hours later it was the rest of us that needed support, the audience rising unsteadily to its feet for a two-minute standing ovation. It was like a meteor had smashed in through the roof and landed square in my lap, all glowing embers of grief I didn’t know what to do with.

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Before starting her career in the film industry as a producer, Wells helped run Digital Orchard, a company specialising in film, finishing images, developing film and digital imaging. Wells was a fellow at the 2020 Sundance Institute Screenwriters and Directors Labs with her feature film debut Aftersun, which premiered at the 2022 Cannes Film Festival to critical acclaim. She received many accolades as a breakthrough director and appeared on numerous year-end lists. Aftersun received an Academy Award nomination for Paul Mescal's performance. The above makes it sound like Aftersun is a heartwarming story about family, but it takes an unexpected turn as the film progresses.

It was the only time he could spend all by himself, and with a sense of peace, he swayed to an inaudible rhythm. The father-daughter dynamic was a frequent topic of conversation after her first feature-film debut Aftersun, a film about a father and daughter. 11-year-old Sophie (Frankie Corio) goes on summer vacation to a Turkish resort with her father, Calum (Paul Mescal), who lives apart. The two spend happy, precious moments with each other, sometimes conversing awkwardly with a camcorder in one hand. In writing Aftersun, she played back old Mini-DV tapes that her father shot of her, sometimes drawing dialogue from the footage.

So unfolds Tuesday, the first short film by the 35-year-old Scottish filmmaker Charlotte Wells, and one that bears many of the hallmarks found in her shattering feature debut, Aftersun. It, too, radiates with the glow of memory while coursing with an undertow of grief. This scene is juxtaposed with images of adult Sophie (Celia Rowlson-Hall) seeing her dad dancing at a rave. Then she holds him as the film flashes between child Sophie dancing and holding her father close and adult Sophie holding him so he cannot leave.

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She hates that song, she wouldn’t rehearse it, and I had to sing it to try and encourage her to come onstage for the shot. When I saw Aftersun at the Telluride Film Festival, it was the first nice experience I had watching — and it was very clear that there was no need to watch it, perhaps ever again. (Laughs.) I did do a director’s commentary, which was completely surreal, but I don’t count that as watching so much as reliving what was happening beyond the frame. I’ve been speaking about the film so much that it strangely starts to feel like some abstraction that isn’t real.

The look of concern on the mother’s face, and the tone of the school day’s interactions, give a sense of some unspoken loss hanging over the girl. Each detail tugs at you until finally, after the girl has spent the afternoon alone in the dying light of her father’s apartment, her mother arrives to quietly take her home. “Aftersun” is one of those films that lingers long after you have watched it.

Aftersun builds its tension by allowing the audience to slowly see more and more of Calum’s pain, until we watch him break down crying. He could have died due to some of his self-destructive behavior, or his mental health issues could have gotten so bad that he disappeared, never to be seen again. His fate isn’t confirmed, but this is a film about grief and loss, at least one aspect of it. So whatever has happened to Calum, the loving father from the vacation is gone forever. We then see Calum recording her as she boards a plane back to Edinburgh to be with her mother and return to her life.