Emma Laird
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“Telling the Story Non-Linearly Felt Essential Because That’s How Trauma Often Works”: Alex Burunova On Her SXSW-Premiering Relationship Drama, Satisfaction
Emma Laird is both incandescent and haunted as she limns the before and after of trauma in Alex Burunova’s SXSW-premiering debut feature, Satisfaction. As Lola, a composer and pianist, Laird is charismatic and full of life in the past and painfully muted in the present, a contrast that engineers the film’s central narrative mystery. Through memory-triggered flashbacks and forwards, Satisfaction orbits around a moment of trauma, the film’s editing rhythms and narrative structure mirroring the emotional evasiveness and repression that Lola must deploy during a Greek island vacation with her musician boyfriend, Philip (Fionn Whitehead). But repression as self-preservation can only […]
by Scott Macaulay on Mar 13, 2025
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