Peter Greenaway, director of The Cook, The Thief, His Wife & Her Lover, is debuting his latest film about legendary Director Sergei Eisenstein at the 65th Annual Berlinale, or the Berlin International Film Festival.
Eisenstein in Guanajuato joins Terrence Malick’s Knight of Cups and Joshua Oppenheimer’s The Look of Silence among the slate of films at 2015’s festival.
Eisenstein was the Russian born director of the silent masterpiece Battleship Potemkin among other classics such as Alexander Nevsky and Ivan the Terrible, Parts I and II. In 1932, Eisenstein released ¡Que viva Mexico!, for which he traveled to Guanajuato, Mexico and experienced desires of love, sex and death that shaped the rest of his career following his early Russian successes.
Here’s the full synopsis of the film, via a press release:
In 1931, at the height of his artistic powers, Soviet filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein travels to Mexico to shoot a new film to be titled Que Viva Mexico. Freshly rejected by Hollywood and under increasing pressure to return to Stalinist Russia, Eisenstein arrives at the city of Guanajuato. Chaperoned by his guide Palomino Cañedo, he vulnerably experiences the ties between Eros and Thanatos, sex and death, happy to create their effects in cinema, troubled to suffer them in life.
Peter Greenaway’s film explores the mind of a creative genius facing the desires and fears of love, sex and death through ten passionate days that helped shape the rest of the career of one of the greatest masters of Cinema.
Eisenstein in Guanajuato stars Elmer Bäck as Eisenstein, Luis Alberti, Maya Zapata, Lisa Owen, Stelio Savante, Rasmus Slätis, and Jakob Öhrman, and premieres February 11 at the Berlinale, which runs from February 5-15. See the poster for the film below:
