October Film Subscription Box

Description:
The Danish Dogme 95 movement that struck world cinema like a thunderbolt began with The Celebration, Thomas Vinterberg’s international breakthrough, a lacerating chamber drama that uses the economic and aesthetic freedoms of digital video to achieve annihilating emotional intensity. On a wealthy man’s sixtieth birthday, a sprawling group of family and friends convenes at his country estate for a celebration that soon spirals into bedlam, as bombshell revelations threaten to tear away the veneer of bourgeois respectability and expose the traumas roiling beneath. The dynamic handheld camera work, grainy natural lighting, cacophonous diegetic sound, and raw performance style that would become Dogme hallmarks enhance the shattering visceral impact of this caustic indictment of patriarchal failings, which swings between blackest comedy and bleakest tragedy as it turns the sick soul of a family inside out.

DIRECTOR-APPROVED SPECIAL EDITION FEATURES
1. 2K digital restoration, approved by director Thomas Vinterberg, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack
2. Audio commentary from 2005 featuring Vinterberg
3. New interview with Vinterberg
4. Two early short films by Vinterberg: Last Round (1993) and The Boy Who Walked Backwards (1995)
5. The Purified, a 2002 documentary about Dogme 95, featuring interviews with Vinterberg and filmmakers Søren Kragh-Jacobsen, Kristian Levring, and Lars von Trier
6. Program in which Vinterberg discusses the real-life inspiration for the film
7. Documentaries featuring members of the cast and crew at the film’s premiere in Copenhagen and reflecting on the production
8. ADM:DOP, a 2003 documentary profile of cinematographer Anthony Dod Mantle
9. Deleted scenes, with optional audio commentary by Vinterberg
10. Trailer
11. PLUS: An essay by critic and author Michael Koresky
12. New cover by Century.Studio

Description
With this sublimely stirring fable of desire and creativity, Jane Campion became the first woman to win a Palme d’Or at Cannes. Holly Hunter is achingly eloquent through silence in her Academy Award–winning performance as Ada, an electively mute Scottish woman who expresses her innermost feelings through her beloved piano. When an arranged marriage brings Ada and her spirited daughter (Anna Paquin, in her Oscar-winning debut) to the wilderness of nineteenth-century New Zealand, she finds herself locked in a battle of wills with both her controlling husband (Sam Neill) and a rugged frontiersman (Harvey Keitel) to whom she develops a forbidden attraction. With its sensuously moody cinematography, dramatic coastal landscapes, and sweeping score, this uniquely timeless evocation of a woman’s awakening is an intoxicating sensory experience that burns with the twin fires of music and erotic passion.

DIRECTOR-APPROVED SPECIAL EDITION FEATURES
1. New, restored 4K digital transfer, supervised and approved by director Jane Campion and director of photography Stuart Dryburgh, with 5.1 surround DTS-HD Master Audio soundtrack
2. In the 4K UHD edition: One 4K UHD disc of the film presented in Dolby Vision HDR and one Blu-ray with the film and special features
3. Audio commentary featuring Campion and producer Jan Chapman
4. New conversation between Campion and film critic Amy Taubin
5. New interviews with Dryburgh, production designer Andrew McAlpine, and Maori adviser Waihoroi Shortland
6. Interview with actor Holly Hunter on working with Campion
7. “The Piano" at 25, a program featuring a conversation between Campion and Chapman
8. Interview with composer Michael Nyman
9. Excerpts from an interview with costume designer Janet Patterson
10. Inside “The Piano," a featurette including interviews with Hunter and actors Harvey Keitel and Sam Neill
11. Water Diary, a 2006 short film by Campion
12. Trailer
13. New English subtitle translation and English subtitles for the deaf and hard of hearing
14. PLUS: An essay by critic Carmen Gray
15. New cover by Greg Ruth

For anyone who thinks "Art Cinema is Boring". The Film Box challenges this notion by demystifying the work of the best filmmakers, by creating a context within which to view them.

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