Jennifer Connelly & Claudia Llosa On ‘Aloft’ [EXCLUSIVE VIDEO]

In writer-director Claudia Llosa‘s Aloft, Jennifer Connelly plays a troubled woman who gets reacquainted with her adult son, whom she abandoned 20 years ago.

Jennifer Connelly, Claudia Llosa On ‘Aloft’

“For me, I thought that she was someone who had a great strength, almost stoicism,” Connelly told uInterview exclusively, speaking of her character Nana Kunning. “But I think if anything the one key [to playing her] is embracing how complicated life can be and how multi-faceted, and allowing her to be complex and make decisions that might not necessarily reflect myself and the choices that I might make as a mother.”

Llosa, the Peruvian filmmaker who received an Oscar nod for The Milk of Sorrow, wanted to return to the theme of loss and healing, specifically self-healing in Aloft. “Starting with a typical family and what happens and what happened, how do we find the way to repair ourselves,” Llosa said, explaining the essence of her latest film. “How do we find the way to believe in life and ourselves again, and what is that mystery and difficulty in accepting the vulnerability of life?”

In Aloft, Connelly’s Nana joins a New Age spiritual group with her two young sons Ivan (Zen McGrath) and Gully (Winta McGrath), believing in the powers of the leader, dubbed The Architect (William Shimmell). Years later, after Gully’s death and abandoning Ivan, Nana is now a healer. Though her apparent spiritually is a through-line in the film, Connelly believes it’s secondary to the dynamics between the mother and son.

“I didn’t meet with healers in preparation for the role because the majority of the story is really about this woman, who actually isn’t quite sure if she believes in that for most of the story,” Connelly told uInterview. “She’s very skeptical about this type of healing herself. And so for me it was more a story of the mother and the son and this journey that they make back to one another. And it’s open ended, I think, to whether she has that power [to heal] or not.”

Connelly has a number of heavy emotional scenes throughout Aloft, one of which one might think the actress would list as the most difficult to shoot for the film. Not so for the Academy Award winning actress. “Maybe working in the hog lot, that was kind of challenging,” the actress said with a smile.

Aloft, which also stars Cillian Murphy, Mélanie Laurent and Oona Chaplin, hits select theaters May 22.