The Other Side of the Wind (2018)

Directed by

Orson Welles

Genre

mockumentary

Country

United States

Runtime

2h 02m

Rated

R

Rating

6.7 of 10 from 233 voters

Elsewhere

IMDb

How it feels

An aging Hollywood film director throws a party to show his unfinished movie on his last day alive. The film blends color and black-and-white footage shot on small film formats to create a mockumentary style.

chaoticunfinishedfragmentedsatiricalrestlessmetaunsettlingcerebral

What happens

The Other Side of the Wind is a 2018 satirical drama film co-written, co-edited, and directed by Orson Welles, and posthumously released after 48 years in development. The film stars John Huston, Bob Random, Peter Bogdanovich, Susan Strasberg, and Oja Kodar. Intended by Welles to be his American directorial comeback after years spent abroad, the film began shooting in 1970 and resumed on and off until 1976. Welles continued to work intermittently on editing the project into the 1980s, but it became embroiled in financial, legal, and political complications which prevented it from being completed. Despite Welles's death in 1985, several attempts were made at reconstructing the unfinished film. The unreleased results would be called "the Holy Grail of cinema". In 2014, the rights were acquired by Royal Road and the completed project was overseen by Bogdanovich and producer Frank Marshall. The story uses a film-within-a-film narrative which follows the last day in the life of an aging Hollywood film director (Huston) as he hosts a screening party for his unfinished latest project. Using color and black-and-white footage, the film was shot on 8 mm and 16 mm in an unconventional documentary style, featuring a rapid-cutting approach between the many cameras of the story's numerous journalists and news-people. It was intended among other things as a satire of both the passing of Classic Hollywood and of the avant-garde film-makers of Europe and New Hollywood in the 1970s. The Other Side of the Wind had its world premiere at the 75th Venice International Film Festival on August 31, 2018, and was released on November 2, 2018, by Netflix to critical praise, accompanied by a documentary, They'll Love Me When I'm Dead. (from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA)

Trailer

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