EXCLUSIVE
HOARD British newcomer Luna Carmoon’s distinctive debut comes straight from the heart…
Hoard was never going to be seen,’ director Luna Carmoon confides to Teasers during the Venice Film Festival. ‘I was going to top myself and leave this story that I wrote, this 20-page story, at the bottom of my bed.’ Suicide is no joking matter, but Carmoon is serious. ‘I was in a strange place. One of my first feature projects just got ghosted. And if you’re someone who has nothing to fall back on, these things are heartbreaking. The whole thing can take you down to rock bottom.’
Thankfully, Carmoon picked herself up and turned her short story into the script for Hoard, an emotionally wrought look at an orphaned, grieving teen, Maria (newcomer Saura Lightfoot-Leon), embroiled in a torrid affair with a charismatic but damaged older man, Michael (Joseph Quinn). ‘It came from a place of venom and sadness,’ says Carmoon. ‘When you feel so disfigured inside, you want people to feel the disfigurement on the outside.’
As the title suggests, the film deals with the issue of hoarding possessions, via Maria’s mother (Hayley Squires). Like so much of Hoard, it came from a personal place. ‘My nan was a hoarder,’ says Carmoon, recalling that her drawers were full of everything from buttons to magic-eye illustrations. But the way Carmoon sees it, ‘hoarding’ has other, more metaphysical meanings. ‘There’s a hoarding of grief in the film, there’s a hoarding of love. There’s a hoarding of all sorts.’
Wowing audiences wherever it’s played, the film scored three prizes in Venice, including a ‘special mention’ for Lightfoot-Leon’s showstopping performance. ‘I knew that Europe would get it more than the Brits,’ Carmoon says, believing that international film folk would accept ‘the ugly’ side of her characters. Put simply, it’s how she sees life. ‘We live in a strange time where we want people to be better. But that’s not the w
