Kim Longinotto in Person

In her graduation film for the National Film and Television School in England, Kim Longinotto puts a painful episode from her past behind her. As a teenager, Longinotto, who shot the film together with Dorothea Gazidis, was condemned by her parents to a girls' boarding school. The school, located in an old and isolated castle in Buckinghamshire, operated as a kind of miniature state with bizarre rules, indigestible food, and absurd, unfair punishments. Longinotto ran away at the age of seventeen, and years later got a unique opportunity for sweet revenge. In subtle but purposeful impressions, from the perspectives of girls still living there, she exposes the school as a repressive world full of unacceptable regulations. With respect to expressiveness, Longinotto's debut certainly measures up to her later work. One year after the release of Pride of Place, the boarding school was closed down.