Nancy

As a failed, socially awkward 35-year-old writer, Nancy (played by rising star Andrea Riseborough, see also TCFF 2018's Closing Night film Burden) has always had problems with her elaborate fictions distorting her sense of reality. But when her mother dies, distinguishing fact from fiction becomes an even more perilous endeavor. After seeing a story on the news about a couple (Steve Buscemi and Ann Dowd) whose 5-year-old daughter went missing 30 years earlier, Nancy becomes convinced that she might actually be their missing daughter, and that she had been stolen away as a child. With Nancy, first-time feature director Christina Choe has given us the perfect female anti-hero for our times—one whose duplicity is presented with the ambiguity that our present-day world is increasingly attaching to notions of truth.