Aftersun director Charlotte Wells is the Winner of the Milos Stehlik Award for Breakthrough Filmmaker from the Chicago Film Critics Association, which is given annually to a newly emerging talent, in honor of Milos Stehlik, who championed the careers of countless new talents as the founder of the internationally renowned FACETS.

In Aftersun, Charlotte Wells’ beautiful portrait of a father and his daughter, Sophie, who reflects on the shared joy and private melancholy of a vacation she took with her charismatic father Calum (Paul Mescal, Normal People) twenty years earlier. Set on the beautiful beaches of Turkey, the young Sophie (Frankie Corio, her first performance in a movie) navigates the distance between the joys of childhood and pressures of adulthood as she and her dad look to connect and build their relationship. But time changes everything, and memories real and imagined shape the past as Sophie tries to reconcile the father she knew with the man she did not know at all.

Wells employs an unusual and gorgeous aesthetic that brings us into the interior space of this parent and child, even as she judiciously withholds details, an approach that finally grants the film a singular emotional punch. Aftersun, which is the remarkable film debut by Charlotte Wells, reimagines the coming-of-age narrative as a poignant, ultimately elusive goal, informed by the present as much as the past. Twenty years later, Sophie’s tender recollections of their last holiday together become a powerful and heartrending portrait of their relationship, as she tries to reconcile her father, in the present and the past, in this superb and searingly emotional film.