Leap Year

Michael Rowe’s outstanding, Cannes winning debut feature is a bold, minimalist study of a woman’s urban isolation and self-destructive acts.

Freelance journalist, Laura, spends most of her time in her small apartment in Mexico City, crossing off the days on her calendar. After a series of emotionally detached one-night stands, she meets the brutal Arturo, and an intense, addictive sexual relationship begins.

Leap Year provokes difficult questions in connecting sex with violence, with frank and explicit depictions of sadomasochistic sex. Gustavo Sanchez Parra is convincingly both cruel and tender, while Monica Del Carmen is hauntingly real, playing Laura with total openness and startling honesty. A bold, minimalist study of urban alienation shot almost entirely within the confines of four walls, this outstanding debut from Michael Rowe, an Australian writer living in Mexico, earned him the Camera D'Or at Cannes.