To reach Luna Carmoon, who is at the other end of a banquet table tucking into her vegetable pie, I have to shuffle sideways along the narrow gap between the seating and the wall. This means 10 seconds elapse between us spotting one another in the London pie-and-mash shop and finally greeting each other across the table. Then I have to shuffle all the way out again to order at the counter. The 26-year-old film-maker, who has thick, frizzy orange hair, might have engineered the whole situation for maximum cringe. “I always make things weird,” she says with a naughty smile.
The proof is in the pie: her debut feature, Hoard, which won three prizes at last year’s Venice film festival, is one of the stickiest, itchiest and most unsettling movies since the heyday of Harmony Korine. It begins in the early 1980s, with young Maria being mollycoddled by her mother, a loving, smothering hoarder who makes nocturnal trolley runs to nearby skips. When the child is taken into care, the film leaps forward to show teenage Maria now living a sedate life. Until, that is, the arrival of her sweaty, shark-eyed foster brother Michael.
