After receiving rave reviews for his animated feature “Waltz with Bachir” in 2008, Israeli director Ari Folman divided critics with his new movie “The Congress” at the Directors’ Fortnight in Cannes this year. Our reviewer on the field described the piece as ambitious, unique and bold but “overloaded with too many ideas“. The film is “regularly diverting from any sort of central narrative to follow tenuous and ill-explained threads that end up in a foggy limbo” and “it poses the old question of whether the immense ambition of the project should be admired over the fact that it falls down on so many of those ambitions.”
Since then, the film was been picked up last month by Drafthouse Films and Films We Like for distribution in North America, aiming for a 2014 theatrical and VOD release. So in the meantime, the folks at The Film Stage are kindly pointing us towards an abundance of promotional material. The movie has a very immersive new website with tons of goodies. Among these, we get two fairly dull behind-the-scenes videos explaining what the filmmaker was trying to achieve by blending animation and live action and by using a cutting-edge VFX technology called the “green screen.” A bit more interesting is a snippet from the soundtrack composed by Max Richter with a music video of the song “Forever Young” performed by lead actress Robin Wright.
Loosely based on Stanislaw Lem‘s (“Solaris”) science fiction novel “The Futurological Congress,” Ari Folman’s “The Congress” stars Robin Wright as an alternate version of herself who sells her digital likeness to a Hollywood studio. Twenty years later, her digital self is now a star and she enters an animated world where she will attend a mysterious Congress as a guest of honor. The film also stars Kodi Smit-McPhee, Danny Huston, Harvey Keitel and Paul Giamatti. Check out the videos a handful of new pics below.
