Logline:

Nora, a mute girl, escapes the family gathering to meet her secret admirer Amir, and make love for the first time.

Synopsis

17-year-old Nora, distant and unable to speak, shares mutual tenderness with Amir, a lonely but wild 15-year-old boy – a grasshopper hunter. During a family gathering, Nora feels pressured by the family and sneaks out to meet Amir. On their brief encounter in nature, they make love for the first time. Her family raise the alarm when they become aware of Nora’s absence, while Nora and Amir go through an awkward feeling of transition between late childhood and the undiscovered world of adulthood.

Director’s Statement

Grasshoppers is a story about forbidden love, and the questions of estrangement and interpretation.
As a kid, I used to spend my time in the remote village of my grandparents. One summer while I was there, my next door neighbor, a girl with a slightly abnormal behavior, was seeing a younger boy from the village. Her family made a scandal out of this, mainly because they did not see her “fit”, or mentally capable to be dating.

Nora and Amir’s meeting is tender, meaningful and dreamy, but is violated by the interpretation from the others, who project their prejudices and ideas upon it. Because of her “disability”, she is denied the possibility of having a lover. One’s desire is like water making its way through rocks, even though it often shows that we only fall in love with the attention we receive, and the way others see us. The action is set in the course of one day, when Nora and the other characters act in a space around which a fog is forming, and grasshoppers are transmitting certain signals to guide her and our view.

Director’s Bio

Hanis Bagashov is born in 1999 in North Macedonia. Hanis Bagashov studies film directing at the NATFA “Krastyo Sarafov” in Sofia, Bulgaria. He is Berlinale Talents, Sarajevo Talents, LIM – Less is More (Le Groupe Ouest), Goethe’s Institut First Films First, European Short Pitch alumnus. His short “Mishko” was selected at Sarajevo Film Festival 2018. He played one of the leading roles in the feature “When the Day Had No Name” by Teona Strugar Mitevska (Berlinale 2017), and “Sisterhood” by Dina Duma (Karlovy Vary 2021). He exhibited his photographic work at the Museum of Contemporary Art – Skopje..

Producer’s Bio

Jérôme Blesson is a founder of La Belle Affaire Productions, based in Montpellier and Paris. Jérôme notably produced the feature Alva by Ico Costa (Rotterdam IFF 2019), Le Pays by Lucien Monot (Vision du Réel 2019), and recently L’Agneau de Dieu by David Pinheiro Vicente (Cannes Official Competition2020).

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