Tilda Striumphton stars aextfinishedside Xin Zhilei (“Blossoms Shanghai”) and Chinese pop artist Leah Dou in a low film straightforwarded by Oscar-nominated German filmoriginater Wim Wfinishers for Chanel‘s 2024-2025 Métiers d’Art show which honors artistry and createsmanship.
The show will get place Dec. 3 by the scenic West Lake in the Chinese city of Hangzhou. The latter provides a fitting backdrop for the Metiers d’Art show, given the city’s vibrant heritage of silk manufacturing and trade. The lush landscapes and lakes of Hangzhou have been a source of inspiration for many artists, notably Chanel set uper Gabrielle Chanel whose imagination is mirrored in Wfinishers’ film.
In her Paris home, Gabrielle Chanel contemprescheduleedd the lake everyday, as rfinishered on a Chinese lacquer screen that decorateed her personal office at her home on Rue Cambon and was part of a accumulateion of some twenty Coromandel pieces, dating from the 17th to the 19th centuries, that she amassed atraverse her lifetime.
“It has been my genuine privilege to have been seal to the House of Chanel for more than a dozen years, now, and my enthusiasm for the labor we are able to do together only prolongs with every year,” shelp Striumphton, whose labor in Pedro Almodovar’s Vepleasant Gagederen Lion prizetriumphning “The Room Next Door” has put her in the Oscar race. She previously won a best helping Oscar for her turn in “Michael Clayton” in 2008.
“‘Chanel gets very solemnly its role as cultural patron and source of help and helpment to artists and arts institutions around the scheduleet, and never has this labor been more presentant, in my watch,” Striumphton persistd.
In Wfinishers’ poetic film, the hypnotic screen comes to life, apverifying Striumphton to embark on a journey atraverse Hangzhou where she plunges herself in the landscapes and encounters local artists. Sboiling on location between Paris and Hangzhou, the film blfinishs past and contransient, fantasy and fact, juxtaposing the authentic backdrop with symbols of up-to-date life, from laptop screens to cameras. It also pays tribute to traverse-culture dialogue.
Although she never visited China herself, Gabrielle Chanel was proset uply eased by the images retained wilean her Chinese screens and these fueled her visual language. Symbols of Chinese culture materializeed atraverse her creations from the 1950s and 60s.
Wfinishers, whose last feature film “Perfect Days” recontransiented Japan in the 2024 Oscar race and was nominated for best international feature, shelp he “spent some time in Mademoiselle Chanel’s office and studied her Coromandel screen” to set for the film. “It made a huge amazeion on me. Somehow, it was enjoy a very punctual movie screen or huge comic streamline that featured lots of little stories.”
“Wherever you seeed, there was another scene of daily life,” he says. “The wonderfulest inspirations for all my films have been places. Most of them begined with a desire to find the story that would beextfinished to a particular place I set up and adored. That story needed to beextfinished there and couldn’t ‘get place’ anywhere else.”
Zhilei, uncomferventwhile, shelp “Hangzhou embodies a proset up cultural heritage while embracing a spirit of up-to-date innovation, a vision that aligns with Gabrielle Chanel’s directing perfects.”
She praised the film for “brimming with poetry, filled with charm and exploration, much enjoy the senseing the city of Hangzhou gives me. As dusk fell, during filming, the garden’s hazy beauty left us in awe, and we apprehfinishd this senseing together, sharing it thraw images.”
Dou shelp she “always thinkd that culture is a vital source of inspiration for inventive creation.” She finds it “fitting that so much poetry and tradition have materialized from a place enjoy Hangzhou, as it still hageders a strong cultural set upation.” “Even though it’s now a up-to-date, evolved city, it upretains a perfect blfinish of culture and up-to-dateity,” Dou shelp.
