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Vesper while great American films fill our screens with false and hyperbolic visual effects that try to disguise soulless and impactless narratives, from Europe comes a proposal that does the opposite: "Vesper", a co-production between Lithuania, France and Belgium that, directed by Kristina Buozyte and Bruno Samper uses beautiful visual effects to bring to life a sensitive and intelligent dystopian story with ecological themes.
Vesper we are in the future. The work of a virus created by humans, ecosystems have collapsed, killing the vast majority of living beings on the planet. The wealthy survivors live in walled citadels, far from the poor who live among a fungal jungle, feeding on seeds and using children's blood as currency.
Here tries to survive Vesper (an excellent Raffiella Chapman), a 13-year-old who cares for her paralyzed father (Richard Brake) and tries to conduct bioengineering experiments at home with the dream of one day working on the Citadel. One day, Vesper runs into Camellia (Rosy McEwen), a mysterious woman from the walled city who soon becomes her hope for a better future. But the ruthless Jonas (Eddie Marsan), Vesper's uncle, will not make things easy for her.
You can almost feel the amazing world built by Buozyte and Samper. Robots, humanoids, oligarchies, complex bioengineered systems, luminescent (and sometimes lethal) flora. It is an immersive world that combines beauty and misery, visually and narratively, organically and with the help of excellent visual and practical effects, as well as an exciting score by Dan Levy.
However, the show does not sacrifice depth because, despite a script that sometimes suffers from simplicity, the narrative construction remains strong thanks to its concern for real issues of ecological destruction itself, which is transformed into a palpable and well-grounded message: In a world decimated by greed, the young generations are our only hope. Effective and arriving science fiction.
IFC Films presents the first trailer for 'Vesper', a promising European science-fiction production directed by Kristina Buozyte and Bruno Samper ('The ABCs of Death 2'), also screenwriters along with Brian Clark.
Set in a dystopian future caused by the collapse of the Earth's ecosystem, the plot of her follows Vesper, a 13-year-old girl who struggles to survive the day to day life of a desolate world with her seriously ill father. . One day like any other, he will meet a mysterious woman whose secret will force him to use her wits, her strength, and her bio-hacking skills to fight for the possibility of a future for her and her father.
The names of the British Eddie Marsan ('Ray Donovan') or the Welshman Richard Brake ('Bingo Hell') stand out in the cast of this film that will be released in theaters in the United States on September 30.
Vesper Public Relations. Los Angeles California. September 2022. The Latin American Cinematheque of Los Angeles (LACLA) gladly presents the Cine Nepantla sample with the stream of the Costa Rican film Ceniza Negra that is part of the celebration of National Hispanic Heritage Month.
Black Ash is an exciting coming-of-age story. Written and directed by Sofía Quirós Úbeda, starring a totally Afro-Latin cast and with the best performances by Smashleen Gutiérrez, Humberto Samuels and Hortensia Smith. The films premiered at the Cannes Film Festival in 2019, representing Costa Rica and being a pioneer for being directed by a woman filmmaker from the country.
IFC Films presents the official trailer for 'Vesper', a promising European science-fiction production directed by Kristina Buozyte and Bruno Samper ('The ABCs of Death 2'), also screenwriters along with Brian Clark.
The names of the British Eddie Marsan ('Ray Donovan') or the Welshman Richard Brake ('Bingo Hell') stand out in the cast of this film that this week was released in French cinemas under the title of 'Vesper Chronicles'.
With regard to those in the United States, its premiere is announced for next September 30, without us knowing for the moment how or when we will see it in Spain, its participation in the Sitges festival not even being confirmed (yet).
A markedly imaginative dystopian fairytale – an eco-futurist film, if you will – Vesper is one of those few science-fiction fantasies that comes with an entire world built in believably. While its story is related in a low-key register, and can seem more like part of a ripening high-end limited-series than a film a Handmaid’s Tale, His Dark Materials, or Noughts + Crosses the visualisation of this high-concept story about a young girl in an enchanted forest is arresting and punches far above its budget level.
At 116 minutes, Vesper is a difficult commercial proposition. After its world premiere in Competition at Karlovy Vary (followed by a Fantasia screening), it will go out through IFC in the US at the end of September, and other key territory deals have been signed (Signature in the UK, for example). Vesper will certainly draw interest, but how this property can be built out is the main underlying question for France’s Bruno Samper and Lithuania’s Krstina Buozyte (Vanishing Waves).
There are no names in this Lithuania-shot, English-language feature from writer-directors Buozyte and Samper. Its British cast is led by Eddie Marsan and newcomers Raffiella Chapman and Rosy McEwen: all are solid and work sympathetically with the environment into which they are thrown, a post-War world, but rural, not industrial. Thirteen year-old Vesper (Chapman) lives in a Brothers Grimm cottage in the woods in a lushly ripe vegetation where everything is alive and possibly sentient or close enough to it. Seeds are the key to her future, but peril surrounds them.
The boxy hovering robot who follows Vesper through the woods, issuing instructions and cautions, is actually her father (Richard Brake), a former soldier who remains parlaysed in his bed at home while his mind accompanies Vesper on her travels. Like everything in this film which is usually presented as inanimate, the robot has a fleshy core as do the giant pulsing jellyfish-like drones which flit through the forest. When one crashes, it disgorges the mysterious Camelia (McEwen); opportunistic suckers find her and start to feed from her flesh until Vesper arrives to rescue her, putting her own life in danger.
The power structure is clear. Camelia comes from the Citadel, although there are many Citadels. The elite ruling classes in these fortresses feed on the blood of children giving rise to a sub-structure of power in the form of a baby farm run by Vesper’s brutal ‘Uncle’ Leo (Marsan) in the forest. He lives here with a feral, inbred gang of his own children, all involuntary donors: he swaps their blood for seeds. When the headstrong Vesper steals some, she unwittingly sets off a chain reaction.
Matters ecological are at the heart of this complex world-build: the instability of natural energy supplies drives the drama. Samper and Buozyte’s conceptualisation, the careful camera of Feliksas Abrukauskas, ingenious production design from Ramūnas Rastauskas and Raimondas Dičius, music by Dan Levy conspire to make. Vesper both more and less than a film at the same time. Is it an elaborate proof of concept for future iterations? One hopes so: something so delicate and well-crafted shouldn’t be left alone in the woods.
The always praiseworthy IFC Films has recently released the poster and teaser trailer of Vesper, a fictional drama resulting from the co-production between Lithuania, France and Belgium starring the young Raffiella Chapman (Law & Order: UK, Miss Pregrine).
vesper film 2022 poster The film was co-directed by Kristina Buozyte and Bruno Samper (ABCs of Death 2: K is for Knell), who also co-wrote it with Brian Clark.
After the collapse of the Earth's ecosystem Vesper, a 13-year-old girl struggling to survive with her paralyzed father, meets a mysterious woman with a secret and who will force her to use her wits, strength and bio-abilities. hacking to fight for a future.
Also in the cast are Richard Blake, Rosy McEwan (The Alienist) and Eddie Marsan (Ray Donovan).
Waiting to see when we will see him in our country, below you will find the international teaser trailer of Vesper, which will be released in US theaters and on VOD on September 30, which gives us an idea of the quality of the special effects.
Vesper Chronicles seems to touch on many of the motifs and themes of classic science fiction post-apocalyptic times, the dialectic of human and inhuman, man and android, carnal and artificial, genetic mutations, the fight against a power that is at once distant, hidden and totalitarian, etc. But this curious European production chooses, far from the spectacular din of Hollywood blockbusters, the path of the initiatory journey, the learning novel, a passage to adulthood experienced in loss and violence.
This path is that of the main character of the film, a teenager named Vesper, living in the woods, in the heart of a harsh and hostile nature, which has become sterile following an ecological collapse. She shares her fate with other miserable survivors, while watching over her bedridden and sick father whose spirit, in the form of a bio-mechanical drone, perpetually follows and assists her.
Somewhere, in distant citadels out of reach, live a few privileged people who, we learn, have escaped the common fate. However, Vesper has developed a particular talent, she is a "bio-hacker", capable of creating plant organisms in her laboratory and who is dedicated to inventing seeds that could save her community from starvation. One fine day, a ship from the citadels crashes nearby. On board, a teenage girl on the run with her father, whom Vesper will try to rescue and then hide, trying to escape both the over-armed henchmen of the citadels and the violence inflicted on her by her uncle's clan. Who is this sweet and mysterious castaway? What is its true nature?.
We guess that Vesper Chronicles is aimed at an audience likely to identify with its young heroine herself, an adolescent audience sensitive to the dimension of oracular warning and ecological apologue, just as much as to a journey where the emancipation would be nourished by a knowledge that would distinguish it from others.
Because Vesper must free himself both from a brutal social environment and from the spirit of a father, a benevolent but also omnipresent flying object. The dark and muddy Lithuanian forests, where most of the scenes were shot, become the setting for a regression of humanity reduced to the most elementary gestures of survival.
At the height of summer, surprisingly few outings are offered to potential spectators. We feel the industry, in need of attendance, concentrating its forces to better rebound at the start of the school year. A choice of four films is still open to curiosity. A feminist thriller, adapted from the bestseller by zoologist Delia Owens. Two ecological dystopias, one animated, the other in real shots, which are rather timely. Finally, a revival of the last century, a joyful satire of the American way of life, embodied by the brilliant Jack Nicholson and Harvey Keitel as rogue cops.
Earth is dead or at least barely survives. As a result of genetic manipulations, she became almost sterile. Earthlings are divided into two societies. Some, the less numerous, live sumptuously in inaccessible Citadels while the common people live in desolate countryside where nothing grows. In exchange for a precious product provided by this new plebs, the messengers of the Citadels give seeds that will only germinate once.
In an improbable hovel, the very young Vesper takes care as best she can of her bedridden father who only communicates with her using a drone. But now, Vesper has read a lot and in particular books on genetics. Having become a formidable bio-hacker, she will end up cracking a code of these disastrous seeds. It was then that a ship from a Citadel crashed down not far from her home. Inside a young woman endowed with mysterious powers.
We are squarely in SF, but not in a blockbuster with special effects every two seconds. The scenario plunges us into a dystopia, the opposite of a utopia, in which violence, social fracture, filth and fear dig their infernal furrows.
Despite a more than limited budget, this film captivates from start to finish. Several reasons for this. First of all, an image that seems to ignore color but sumptuously lit, often reminiscent of Rembrandt and Vermeer (pardon the little!), a staging combining offbeat rhythms giving the story a disturbing "human" side, a direction of millimeter actor completes, on a soundtrack of unfathomable darkness, to plunge us into the nauseating meanders of a future that the current situation of our planet no longer gives us the possibility of ignoring.
On an Earth where nothing grows, humanity has returned to the state of medieval civilization. The planet is now dominated by a privileged caste who live in refuge in citadels, a kind of immense metallic mushrooms with tubular roots that sink into a ground shrouded in mist. This end-of-the-world universe is due to the madness of certain agricultural researchers who played sorcerer's apprentices by operating genetic mutations on plants, fauna and flora, making the planet sterile.
In a fairytale cabin, lost deep in an emerald forest, more disturbing than enchanting, a young girl named Vesper (tremendous Raffiella Chapman, spotted by Tim Burton in Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children) survives with her dad. A former soldier who worked for the Citadels, the man, now bedridden, only communicates with his daughter through a sort of flying drone in the shape of a robot's head.
The teenager has tinkered with a makeshift laboratory to keep her father alive. A genius bio-hacker, she pursues an objective in the form of an initiatory quest: to manage to refertilize the rare seeds which remain on Earth and which are distributed sparingly by the scientists belonging to the Citadels.
At the antipodes of any American standardization, the Franco-Lithuanian couple Bruno Samper and Kristina Buozyte have created a fresco of dreamlike and vegetal anticipation that takes unknown paths. After their first film, Vanishing Waves (2013), Vesper Chronicles clears a visual terra incognita, that of ecological science fiction.
Usually, the apocalypse is shown in cinema using large desert spaces, like in Mad Max or The Road. The sun is scorching there and the harshness of the air vibrating with heat is part of the journey. Here, the impression of scorched earth is over. The authors set up a sticky, dark and fantastic wet universe. This biological, organic science fiction produces an astonishing film, which smells of humus, and allows the viewer to embark on a walk in the forest from which he will not come out unscathed.
