‘Lust,’ From Locarno Winner Ralitza Petrova, Picked Up by Inwave Films Ahead of Berlin Premiere (EXCLUSIVE)

Paris-based sales agency Inwave Films has secured international rights to “Lust,” the sophomore feature by Ralitza Petrova . The film is set to world premiere in the Forum strand at the Berlin Film Festival , which runs Feb. 12-22. Petrova’s debut feature, “Godless,” premiered at the Locarno Film Festival in 2016, winning the Golden Leopard for best film, followed by 27 further awards, and a nomination for the European Discovery Award from the European Film Academy. “Lust” follows Lilian, a parole officer whose life is governed by clinical precision-her body, emotions, and desires held under strict control. When she is summoned back to her hometown to settle the death of an absent father, what should be a brief administrative detour unravels into unresolved debts, institutional inertia, and a decaying body caught in bureaucratic limbo. Popular on Variety Moving through offices, hotel rooms, and abandoned dwellings, “Lust” charts a “descent into proximity - with grief, flesh, and a desire long anesthetized.” An uneasy connection with a Shibari rigger - someone engaged in a form of bondage involving rope - offers “a practice of controlled vulnerability, where intimacy is negotiated rather than promised.” “With austere restraint and unsettling tenderness, ‘Lust’ explores the fragile boundary between authority and surrender, asking what remains when control is no longer enough,” according to a statement. “In 2016, my father passed away - someone I barely knew,” Petrova stated. “What followed was not conventional grief, but the mourning of an absence already in place. ‘Lust’ emerged from this space as a way of framing what is missing and how it lingers. I wanted the film to observe with a minimalist gaze the emptiness left by absent fathers and how daughters carry that weight. Conceived as a coming-of-mid-age psychodrama, ‘Lust’ moves between mystery, fantasy, and ghost story - not to resolve absence, but to trace how it unsettles control and, at times, creates an opening.” “Through a rigorously female gaze, Ralitza turns a familiar story of desire and trauma into a precise psychodrama where erotic tension is inseparable from a woman’s attempt to reclaim her own body,” commented Xueyin Li and Yuxuan Zhang, founders of Inwave Films. “Her treatment pushes the film far beyond its genre set-up, towards something quietly ritualistic and existential, echoing the spiritual undercurrents that run through all her work. We were struck by the way she works with absence: a missing father, a disowned body, a need for control, then allows cracks to appear through a visual language that stays composed while everything underneath is shifting. In a landscape where depictions of sexuality are still so often framed from the outside, ‘Lust’ feels rare because it speaks from inside the character and invites the audience into that same unsettling intimacy.” “Lust” is produced by Petrova for Aporia Filmworks of Bulgaria, in collaboration with Poli Angelova and Nikolay Todotov for Screening Emotions in Bulgaria. It is co-produced by Denmark’s Snowglobe and Sweden’s Silver Films, with backing by the Bulgarian National Film Center, Danish Film Institute,...

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