Discussing “Hoard,” Saura Lightfoot-Leon’s first feature film, the conversation quickly turns to anti-clutter expert Marie Kondo.
“I’m actually like that in my real life,” says the Dutch actress, speaking over video from her current home in London. A bookcase, carefully curated, is visible behind her. “I don’t mind throwing things away,” she adds. “Objects carry a lot of weight.”
As the title suggests, the premise of “Hoard” is built around a hoarding disorder, but the film is focused on the emotional clutter that accumulates. The film opens with a young Maria and her mother sorting through trash on the street, which they cart back and add to their growing collection at home. After an accident brings the situation to a head, Maria is sent to live in a foster home. Lightfoot-Leon carries the story as teenaged Maria, whose world is again thrown into disarray with the arrival of a former foster resident and kindred spirit, portrayed by Joseph Quinn.
The film premiered at the Venice Film Festival in 2023, where it won four awards, including a jury special mention for film lead Lightfoot-Leon.
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“I think none of us expected what happened. So it just felt really special,” says the actress, who attended the festival premiere with her parents, choreographers Paul Lightfoot and Sol León. (Who, she notes, were currently at the festival for the premiere of their own project, Luca Guadagnino’s “Queer.”)
“My parents were really moved. It was the first time they saw me in a film,” says Lightfoot-Leon, who graduated from the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London in 2020. “Seeing someone’s face who you love on a big screen, it’s gonna have an impact on you no matter what — and let alone your child. So it was a really big deal for them. They loved it.”
“Hoard” is also writer-director Luna Carmoon’s first feature film, and the script was informed by her own childhood. The film is a coming-of-age drama, as well as an exploration of how trauma manifests through new relationships. Visually, the film leans into discomfort, provoking visceral reactions from the viewer through scenarios that toe the line of disgust and desire.
Lightfoot-Leon credits Carmoon’s decision to keep certain scenes in the film secret until right before filming.
“I loved the element of mystery, which kept certain scenes in the film really fresh and risky. You don’t know what you’re going to get. You don’t know how we’re going to react in the moment,” says Lightfoot-Leon. In one scenario, a one-take shot, Lightfoot-Leon and Quinn’s characters turn a dinnertime meal into a full-body experience.
“The most important thing that I think made those scenes work was the playfulness. Like a child, you have to throw yourself in and be prepared to just have fun, and whatever happens will be the right thing,” says Lightfoot-Leon. “Maria has a real sense of animal feral-ness, this quality that you can only access when you let go. And, you know, a lot of my childhood was that, about letting go and expressing yourself.”
Growing up with parents enmeshed in the dance world — the couple were longtime choreographers for the Nederlands Dans Theater — cultivated an early love for performance.
“My home was in the rehearsal rooms, and there’s lots of footage that my dad has of them choreographing, making videos in the studio. And then there’s me in a tutu jumping in front of the camera, just trying to get their attention,” says the actress. “That was my childhood and it was madness, but also I had so much physical information just purely by watching,” she adds. “And that’s how I learned to communicate and express myself.”
An English teacher eventually pointed her in the direction of acting and encouraged her to apply to RADA. Next, new fans can catch Lightfoot-Leon in “American Primeval,” a Taylor Kitsch-led miniseries for Netflix set in the American West that was shot in Santa Fe last year.
“That was again a very physical performance,” she says. “I play a Mormon wife who gets abducted. The story is based on this real massacre that happened in 1857. It’s about how it unravels, but you see people fighting for their lives, literally, but also for what they believe in.”
Lightfood-Leon is also currently filming “The Agency” for Paramount+, based on the French series “Le Bureau des Légendes.” “I play a character who is a young spy in training, who gets sent out to the deep end,” she says of the espionage series, led by Michael Fassbender and produced by George Clooney. “I think this is the toughest job I’ve done.”
And although her early screen projects are tonally quite different, there is a common thread. “All the characters I’ve played are very strong women,” she says. “Not necessarily strong in the same way, but they’re all discovering something, and they have a willingness to discover.”
Lightfoot-Leon already anticipates that element of discovery within a future rewatch of “Hoard.” Summing up her relationship with the film, she chooses an apt metaphor: home.
“I feel like it’s a bit of a home, and also now a bit of a distant memory,” she says of her breakout role. “I was very naive and fresh when I filmed it, and I think we all gave a lot to it. We made it with a lot of heart.”
