LOGLINE
A mother and daughter take a trip to Japan - they encounter the past, uncertain futures and the distance between them.
SYNOPSIS:
Deep in the Sydney suburbs, Greta (40) clears out her mother’s apartment. The task is a reckoning with her loss, with the history resonant in every object, in every room.
Dismantling her mother’s home, Greta is engulfed by memories of a trip they made to Japan a few years earlier. She is transported back to neon Tokyo streets, typhoon-lashed forest trails and crowded tourist hotspots. She is reunited with her mother, with the intricate knots at the heart of their relationship. As they wander through galleries and museums, share hotel rooms, streak across countryside on bullet trains, both women struggle with shifting senses of self and purpose. Greta contemplates the duality of her Chinese and Australian heritage, her role as a daughter and ambivalence towards motherhood. Her mother faces the complexity of old age, of generational divide, of loneliness. Each is hoping that somehow this trip will close the distance between them.
These memories of their time in Japan act as portals to deeper places in Greta’s past. As she crosses into unknown territory - life without her mother - she recalls other moments of threshold. Fervent studying at university, fleeting childhood visits to Hong Kong, outback road trips with her lover... These visions of her younger self - grappling to learn, to love, to discover an authentic way of life - emerge vivid and full, as she empties the rooms around her. The past emerges to help her mourn her mother and step into the future.
GRETA | DAUGHTER
LI YAN | MOTHER
Li Yan Qiu was born in Hong Kong. As a young woman she immigrated to Australia and settled in Sydney. She raised two daughters as a single parent and travelled back to Hong Kong just a few times. In her 60s, she moves to a new apartment, close to her eldest daughter and grandchildren. Her younger daughter, Greta, invites her on a trip to Japan a few months later.
JENNY | SISTER
LAURIE | GRETA'S PARTNER
NATHANIEL | LAURIE'S FATHER
THE LECTURER
JESSICA AU | Author
ABOUT THE BOOK
Cold Enough for Snow was published in 2021 after being selected from over 1500 entries as the winner of the inaugural Novel Prize. It is published by Giramondo (Aus), Fitzcarraldo Editions (UK) and New Directions (USA) and translated into over eighteen languages around the world. The novel went on to win the The Readings Prize for New Australian Fiction in 2022.
In February 2023, the novel won both the Victorian Prize for Literature and the Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for Fiction. Following on from this success, Cold Enough For Snow won the Prime Minister's Literary Award for Fiction and was long listed for the Dublin Literary Award, the world’s most valuable annual prize.
IN THE PRESS
“Au’s novel is perhaps most masterly in the way it evokes our dissociation from desire—our own and other people’s... we can sense it in the soft, patient warmth of Au’s prose, which sometimes feels attuned to truths just out of the narrator’s reach.” — The Sydney Morning Herald
‘Au’s novel is ... masterly in the way it evokes our dissociation from desire— our own and other people’s.... We can sense it in the soft, patient warmth of Au’s prose, which sometimes feels attuned to truths just out of the narrator’s reach.’ — Peter C. Baker, New Yorker
‘Au’s calm, unrelenting focus would be hard to take over a longer book – but this novella is graceful and precise. Like the narrator fine-tuning the aperture on her Nikon camera, Au seems to say, we have to choose our scale, what we pay attention to.’ — Imogen Dewey, The Guardian
‘Slim, beautifully simple ... [Au] finds momentum in the closely observed oscillations of a single relationship.’ — Baya Simons, Financial Times
‘Au’s writing ebbs along effortlessly and poetically.’ — The Australian
CINEMATIC ADAPTATION | by Jemima James
I read Cold Enough For Snow in one absorbed sitting. When I finished it and looked up, the room had grown dark around me. I’ve rarely read something so precise yet tender; that I knew would continue to work in me, to provoke and inspire. I felt compelled to respond, not just as a reader but as a filmmaker, to expand into Jessica Au’s deeply cinematic work. The novel has an innate sensuality, aching silences, detailed observation. Film can embody the emotional complexity of this story - framing its characters in rich layers of place, time and memory.
A story placing a mother/daughter relationship at its centre, exploring its profound impacts and reverberations, is one I want to tell. Audiences are hungry for stories which imbue their female protagonists with nuanced inner lives and give full, textured weight to their experiences of the world. I believe that a story mining the complicated bond between two women, without resorting to over-simplification or knee-jerk extremity, is still an act of resistance in our cinema culture, still vital and important.
WRITER | DIRECTOR STATEMENT
Cold Enough For Snow slips between past and present with deft ambiguity. It collides, with incredible beauty, sun-drenched Australia, autumnal Japan and half-remembered fragments of Hong Kong. Woven inextricably between them is the intimate story of a mother and daughter; their experience of migration, of identity and belonging.
Our protagonist – Greta – is viscerally caught in a schism of time and place. Grief makes her a time traveller and immersed in layers of memory, she grapples with a multitude of questions.
How do we live with what we inherit?
How does the act of caring for those we love change?
How can we navigate the unspoken chasms that exist between us and those we love?
These questions will underpin Cold Enough For Snow – creating a film that resonates profoundly beyond the specificity of its story. We intend to make a film in which our domestic lives are rendered as vividly as the landscapes that hold them; in which the crucial moments of our everyday lives are given quiet, powerful scrutiny. For both characters and audiences, our human struggle to articulate who we are, to each other, to ourselves, will be at this story's heart.
A FILM BY
JEMIMA JAMES | Director & Writer
ABOUT THE DIRECTOR
Jemima James is a UK based writer and director. Over the last decade she has worked predominantly in theatre, combining experimental independent pieces and teaching with innovative works as part of renowned company, Complicité.
She was Associate Director and Co-Dramaturg for their highly acclaimed production of The Encounter, which premiered at the Edinburgh International Festival and sold out two separate runs at London’s Barbican Centre. The show transferred to Broadway and ran for three months, as well as touring extensively and toured extensively internationally.
Her first short film as writer/director, Grace On A Saturday Night, was funded by BFI Network. It was officially selected for both the Manchester International Film Festival and Nottingham Film Festival in 2021.
DIRECTOR CREDITS
CREATIVE TEAM
CASTING secured | Susanne C. Scheel is a New York-based casting director with a Bachelor of Science in Film and Television from Boston University. She has won three Casting Society of America Artios Awards for Excellence in Casting and has had the honour of collaborating with visionary creatives Joel Coen, Ethan Coen, Frances McDormand including her debut feature, Bjorn Runge’s film The Wife and co-cast with Ellen Chenoweth for Celine Song’s Academy Nominated film, Past Lives.
MUSIC in discussion | Lucinda Chua is a singer, songwriter, composer, producer and multi-instrumentalist based in South London. Born in London and raised in Milton Keynes, Chua has English, Malaysian and ancestral Chinese roots. Having learned music by ear from the age of three using the Suzuki method, Chua regards music as a natural form of non-verbal self-expression.
PRODUCTION TEAM
Modern Films is a London-based film production, distribution and digital exhibition company.
Launched in 2017, with the Event Cinema release of Manifesto starring Cate Blanchett and Executive Production on the Zambian-Welsh I Am Not a Witch, that premiered in Director’s Fortnight at the Cannes Film Festival and went on to win three BIFAs and a BAFTA, receive an Independent Spirit Award nomination and be selected as the official UK entry for the Academy Awards.
In addition to Cold Enough for Snow, they are in development on the English-language remake of the acclaimed French feature Deux.
They also represent the rights to over 100 films, including the history-making BAFTA and Oscar winner Drive My Car.
Winner of the Highly Acclaimed Distributor of Year 2019-2022.
Producer | Founder + CEO | Eve Gabereau, is an award-winning film distributor and producer and the founder of Modern Films. Previously, she co-founded and ran the leading indie distribution company Soda Pictures for 15 years - representing over 350 acclaimed films, including Oscar® nominee Toni Erdmann, Adam Driver-starrer Paterson and multiple works by Kelly Reichardt. She was a strategic leader in their M&A with media group Thunderbird Entertainment, backers of Blade Runner 2049 and is featured in the book The British Film Industry in 25 Careers: The Mavericks, Visionaries and Outsiders Who Shaped the British Cinema.
Producer + Production Consultant | May Leung, with decades of feature and series experience on award-winning films such as Bohemian Rhapsody and Inception brings her production and visual effects knowledge into discussions with regards to methodology, innovative filming and cost efficiencies as well as creative visuals.
Co-Production with award winning Melbourne based Producer, Nick Batzias, Founder and Managing Partner of GoodThing Productions along side Virginia Whitwell, Partner and Head of Production with almost 20 years of experience in the film industry having worked across acquisition, distribution and production.
Production Services | In collaboration with TOHO Tombo Pictures Inc, an international production entity which joins the forces of TOHO the legendary production house, home of such giants as Godzilla and Akira Kurosawa, with Georgina Pope, a seasoned Tokyo based producer.