Karim Aïnouz’s ninth narrative feature, Rosebush Pruning, sets its sights on a wealthy, isolated American family whose designer excess and pop-song hedonism curdle into something far darker once an outsider breaches their world.
Written by Yorgos Lanthimos’s longtime collaborator Efthimis Filippou and shot under the Catalonian sun, the film continues Aïnouz’s recent run of studies in domestic power—following Firebrand‘s absolute rule and Motel Destino‘s abusive intimacy—this time turning that lens on the ordinary machinery of the bourgeois nuclear family. With a cast led by Callum Turner, Riley Keough, Jamie Bell, Elle Fanning, Tracy Letts, and Pamela Anderson, and premiering at the Berlin Film Festival, Rosebush Pruning is, in Aïnouz’s own words, an attempt to provoke the kind of laughter that implicates the audience laughing along with it.
Ahead of the film’s release, CANNOPY sat down with Aïnouz to talk about privilege, patriarchy, and pruning the family tree. In this excerpt, Aïnouz talks about what it means to make art that has shock value in a world with a 24-hour news cycle that constantly informs us of absurdities stranger than fiction.
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