Brady Corbet’s ‘The Brutalist’, winner of the Best Director Award at the Venice Film Festival, completes the Official Section of the 69th edition

• Starring Adrian Brody and Felicity Jones, it tells the story of a Hungarian-Jewish architect who escapes the Holocaust and goes into exile in the United States.
• With “The Brutalist’, there are now 22 feature films set to compete for the Seminci Golden Spike, taking place from October 18 to 26.
• The Official Short Film Section also incorporates a new title in competition: ‘An Urban Allegory’, by Alice Rohrwacher and JR

Valladolid, October 4, 2024. The 69th edition of the Valladolid International Film Festival will screen The Brutalist, the film that brought critics to their feet at the recent Venice Film Festival, and which walked away with the Silver Lion for Best Director for American Brady Corbet. Starring Adrien Brody (The Pianist), Felicity Jones (The Theory of Everything) and Guy Pearce (Memento, L.A. Confidential), it tells the story of Jewish-Hungarian exile László Toth, who manages to reach the United States after World War II and succeeds as an architect thanks to the financial support of a businessman.

Freely inspired by the experiences of architect Marcel Breuer, designer of the Whitney Museum in New York, and other representatives of the Brutalist art movement, The Brutalist is the story of an immigrant’s rise in a new country, the reconstruction of a marriage after ten years separated by the war, and the dilemma between talent and success. If The Fountainhead (1949), King Vidor‘s adaptation of Ayn Rand‘s novel about an architect played by Gary Cooper, became a defense of individualism against communism, The Brutalist is the story of how the American dream turns toxic.

The screenplay is written by American actor and director Brady Corbet and fellow filmmaker Mona Fastvold (The Sleepwalker, The World to Come). Corbet made his directorial debut in 2015 with The Childhood of a Leader, winner of the Best Director Award in the Orizzonti section and winner of the Luigi De Laurentiis Award for Best First Film at the Venice Film Festival. His next film, Vox Lux: The Price of Fame, starring Natalie Portman and Jude Law, also premiered at the Venice Film Festival. As in the previous two films, in The Brutalist Corbet takes the pulse of key moments of the 20th century. In this case, what fascinated him was how post-war psychology left its mark on architecture and how the two world wars forced such prominent architects as Le Corbusier and Mies van der Rohe to start afresh outside their own country.

“The Brutalist examines how the immigrant experience mirrors the artistic one, in the sense that when you do something bold, daring or new, you tend to get criticized for it. And then, as time goes on, you’re idolized and honored for what you’ve done,” says Corbet, who spent seven years making this film a reality. “We loved the relationship of camaraderie, friendship and love that was developing between László and Erzsébet [his wife] as we were writing the script. Those were the first sparks and ideas that gave birth to The Brutalist,” adds Fasvold.

The cast is headed by Adrien Brody in the role of the architect. The American actor not only previously played another Holocaust survivor in The Pianist; he also shares The Brutalist’s Hungarian origin with the protagonist. His mother was born in Budapest and emigrated as a young woman to the United States, fleeing the Communist regime after the 1956 Hungarian Revolution. “I saw in The Brutalist a story of quiet perseverance and someone with a need to strive for excellence. Even when the very ground you walk on is taken away from you,” Brody assures. His co-star, Felicity Jones, was attracted to the combination of violence, humanity and romance that underlies the relationship between the architect and his wife after so many years separated by war.

Shot in Budapest, the production design is by Judy Becker (Carol), who took on the challenge of constructing a brutalist design that could have been created by an architect trained at the Bauhaus School. One of the reasons why the director also chose the Hungarian capital for the shooting was the decision to use celluloid, a material whose use survives in the Hungarian industry. Filmed in 70mm, in VistaVision format (the one used by Hitchcock in North by Northwest, for example), the result is a three-and-a-half-hour work that is visually and narratively overwhelming.

With the incorporation of The Brutalist, which Universal Pictures International Spain will release in theaters in Spain on January 24, 2025, there are now 22 feature films in competition in the Official Section of the 69th edition of the Valladolid International Film Festival, which will begin on October 18.

New title in the Short Films in Competition section

The Official Short Film Section in competition is completed with the Spanish premiere of An Urban Allegory, written and co-directed by the Italian filmmaker Alice Rohrwacher and the French urban artist JR, after its screening at the Venice Film Festival. Their previous joint work, Omelia contadina, was awarded in 2020 at SEMINCI. An Urban Allegory starts from the myth of the cave, expounded by Plato, to create a metaphorical space that reflects on what would happen if a seven-year-old boy managed to escape from the cave. In addition to the child protagonist, played by Naïm El Kaldaoui, Lyna Khoudri and film director Leos Carax take part in this short film.

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