Director

Uberto Pasolini

Italy, Romania, United Kingdom | 2020 | 96 min | English

• Producer Roberto Sessa, Cristian Nicolescu, Uberto Pasolini
• Production Company Picomedia, Red Wave Films, Digital Cube, Rai Cinema Eurimages, CNC, MIBACT, Northern Ireland Screen
• Screenplay Uberto Pasolini
• Cinematography Marius Panduru
• Editing Masahiro Hirakubo, Saska Simpson
• Sound Derek Hehir, Marius Leftărache
• Cast James Norton, Daniel Lamont, Eileen O’Higgins, Valerie O’Connor, Stella McCusker

About the Film

Based on a true story, director Uberto Pasolini’s Northern-Island-set film Nowhere Special tells the moving story of a 34-year-old window cleaner, who has brought up his young son alone; the child’s mother left them soon after he was born. When it turns out that John (James Norton) is only given a few months to live, he sets about trying to find a perfect family to look after the 3-year-old, as well as trying to shield him from the dark reality of what is to come.

Former producer—who made The Full Monty—Pasolini’s previous film Still Life, starring Eddie Marsan, screened at Venice. Like Nowhere Special, it was also an intimate character-based drama. This new film essentially focuses on the relationship between John and his son Michael (played delightfully by young Daniel Lamont), with the strong rapport between the two actors becoming the beating heart of the film.

Fionnuala Halligan wrote in Screen Daily: “Pasolini uses the interviews with prospective families as a way to crack John open; taken into care himself at a young age, he is guarded and has been hurt, especially by Michael’s mother, who left them when he was tiny for her native Russia without leaving any contact details. When we demand that cinema opens up to under-represented voices, John is one of them: white, poor, uneducated, alone, and with a troubled past. It’s perhaps odd on paper that he would be played by an actor like Norton, but it’s also hard, having seen it, to imagine who would do a better job.”

Mark Adams