Light up the Void  

With The Ice Tower, Lucile Hadžihalilović continues her singular exploration of adolescence, fascination, and power.
Set in the 1970s, the film follows Jeanne, a 15-year-old girl who escapes from a remote mountain orphanage. Wandering alone, she finds shelter in a large, isolated building that soon reveals itself to be a film studio.

A cinematic adaptation of Hans Christian Andersen’s The Snow Queen is being shot there. Jeanne enters this artificial world of icy sets and controlled illusions, dominated by the presence of Cristina, a renowned and enigmatic actress playing the Snow Queen. Cold, distant, and magnetic, Cristina quickly becomes the object of Jeanne’s intense fascination. A relationship develops between them, marked by admiration, ambiguity, and an unspoken imbalance of power.

As the shooting progresses, the boundaries between fiction and reality gradually dissolve. Jeanne becomes increasingly absorbed by the frozen universe of the film and by Cristina herself, drawn into a symbolic “ice tower” that promises escape and transformation but also carries the risk of erasure. Lucile Hadžihalilović tells this story with minimal dialogue, relying instead on atmosphere, gesture, and a carefully controlled visual language.

Through its hypnotic imagery and restrained narrative, The Ice Tower unfolds as a disturbing coming-of-age tale. The film examines the construction of identity, the seductive nature of idealized figures, and the quiet violence embedded in relationships of domination. Cinema itself becomes both refuge and trap — a space where desire, illusion, and loss of innocence converge.