Multi-award-winning historical drama The Widow’s Last will premiere exclusively online via Omeleto’s YouTube platform – the home of award-winning short films on Friday 9th October 2020 at 6 am EST / 11 am BST. Set in Ireland, during the third year of The Great Hunger, The Widow’s Last tells the story of Kathryn Healy, a hardened young widow who fights to keep her son alive during one of the darkest times in history. Starving from lack of food and with her son stricken by fever, she stumbles across an English landlord, wounded and himself on the edge of death. This encounter with the enemy sets her on an unexpected path where she is forced to confront her own inhumanity and decide who she will become.
Writer and director Vanessa Perdriau comments, I’ve always been moved by human stories and lives from bygone eras, especially ones that grapple with issues we can all relate to but when I wrote the film I never could have imagined how timely its message would be. Just like our present reality, this film is set in a time of immense hardship, sickness, and racial strife and it is my hope is that this story and these characters would light a path for us in turbulent times.”
Official Trailer for The Widow’s Last by Vanessa Perdriau
This marks director Vanessa Perdriau‘s debut short with outstanding performances from Charlotte Peters (Kathryn Healy), Damien Hasson (Sean O’Conner), Matthew Wolf (Edmund Kingston), and newcomer Sam Hardy (Michael Healy).
This ambitious and powerful drama won The Pitch Film Fund in 2016, a fund which supports emerging filmmakers and is open to entries every year, for short films inspired by the Bible. The award included a budget of £25,000 along with production support from Reel Issues Films.
Producer Luke Walton said, “It was clear from our earliest conversations that Vanessa was not only talented and determined but that she had a passion to tell a story of courage and justice. She chose a story that has been resonating not just for a little over 170 years, but in fact one that would have been recognized for generations. It is as powerful and timely today as it has ever been.”
After the film’s international debut at the prestigious Galway Film Festival, where it was nominated in the Best Short category alongside Oscar-winner Benjamin Cleary’s latest film, it went on to play at over 20 international festivals, qualifying and garnering awards for Best Film and Best Production Design and was picked up for distribution by Aer Lingus’ in-flight entertainment.
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