Virginia Heath’s award-winning film ‘Lift Share’ nominated for Best Foreign Film at the Rome Independent Film Festival

Professor Virginia Heath‘s Lift Share has been nominated in the Foreign Film category of the upcoming Rome Independent Cinema Festival. The festival, held at the prestigious Casa del Cinema in Villa Borghese in central Rome, will feature open-air screenings preceding the awards ceremony in a night of celebration of independent cinema, taking place on Saturday 31 August 2019. To find out more and to see the official selection and full list of nominations see here.

In Lift Share, two strangers meet through an online lift share website: a young Romanian woman in desperate search of a child that was forcibly taken from her and a Scottish musician returning to the Isle of Harris to face up to the death of his violent, estranged father.  As they drive through the Scottish Highlands, the film moves between present and future time frames as each character imagines what they might do when they reach the Outer Hebrides.  Alone with their fears, the haunting beauty of the remote Islands helps them find escape from their past pain. The comfort that only strangers can bring enables them to share a moment of hope for the future.

The film was made with support from Creative Scotland, BFI.NETWORK, Scottish Film Talent Network, An Comhairle (Western Isles Council), Faction North, Kolik Films and the Art & Design Research Centre (ADRC) at Sheffield Hallam University.

Professor Virginia Heath is a Professor of Film in the Art and Design Research Centre at Sheffield Hallam University, and is a writer, film-maker and researcher. Virginia teaches on Sheffield Hallam’s MA in Filmmaking. Virginia has written and directed several award winning films and her films are screened at international film festivals including Berlin, Cannes, The Hamptons, New York, Vancouver, St Petersburg. Virginia’s projects include My Dangerous Loverboy (2009)  a powerful multi-platform project addressing human-trafficking and sexual-exploitation which formed the basis of an outstanding Impact Case Study  for Unit of Assessment 34: Art & Design (History, Theory & Practice) in REF2014, and From Scotland with Love (2014) a feature-length poetic documentary combining archive footage and original music composition which received a BAFTA Scotland nomination.