THE CONGRESS World Cinema

Elegant Robin Wright plays an aging actress who stopped working in order to prioritize her family. Desperate to avoid oblivion and rescue her career, she licenses her image and accepts an offer from Miramount Studios to be digitally replicated and turned into a virtual movie star in perpetuity. Twenty years later, Robin is summoned by Miramount to the Futurological Congress, where she enters an animation-only zone in which people take hallucinatory drugs to distort reality and escape their misfortune. Robin quickly realizes she is a mega meta astar – her image is being used ubiquitously for major studio profit – and she must endure a tempestuous journey to find her genuine identity. Director Ari Folman’s elaborate sophomore feature film presents a critique of the contemporary culture of desire and its obsession with immortality. Based on a novel by Stanislaw Lem, THE CONGRESS changes the expectations of storytelling by pushing the limits of filmmaking in an enchanting odyssey of visual originality.