Headington Shark Inspires Fortune's Karlovy Vary Premiere
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- "Learning to Breathe Under Water" premiered at the Karlovy Vary Film Festival in the Special Screenings sidebar and is positioned as offbeat, family-friendly festival fare likely to attract indie distributors.
- The film draws inspiration from the real Headington Shark, a 25-foot fibreglass sculpture installed on an Oxford, England rooftop in 1986 by sculptor John Buckley and homeowner Bill Heine as anti-nuclear-warfare protest art.
- Rory Kinnear (BAFTA nominee) stars as a widowed artist named Peter; Maria Bakalova (Oscar nominee) plays Anya, a Bulgarian au pair brought in to help the household; and 11-year-old Ezra Carlisle (recently in "Hokum") plays Peter's son Leo, the film's narrator.
- Director Rebekah Fortune previously made the 2017 teen drama "Just Charlie," about a soccer prodigy's gender dysphoria, and the review says she again shows a gentle aptitude for articulating complex emotional struggles from a youthful point of view.
- The fiction relocates the shark sculpture to a nondescript Irish family home, where Leo whispers his secret thoughts into the beast's synthetic belly as a form of one-sided therapy while his father remains sunk in depression.
- The review flags some shortcuts: Fortune and production designer May Davies lean on a blue-versus-yellow color shorthand for the characters' psychological states, the third-act recovery shift comes too quickly, and Anya's speech about the shark's symbolic significance lands too directly on the nose.
- Naive animated intrusions illustrate Leo's imagination throughout, with the review highlighting Carlisle's 'excellent, unaffected performance' that sells the boy's earnest vulnerability with 'just a hint of deadpan irony.'
Why it matters: For indie distributors and festival programmers, the combination of an Oscar nominee (Bakalova), a BAFTA nominee (Kinnear), and a breakout 11-year-old in Carlisle gives the film recognizable casting hooks, while Fortune's track record with emotionally complex youth-centered stories signals a director with a defined sensibility. The reviewer's verdict — 'highly likable, heart-on-sleeve' but grounded in incremental rather than transformative arcs — frames the project as broadly accessible art-house fare rather than divisive work, shaping how acquirers will price and position it.
