Events

Strand Releasing is proud to announce the US release of STAYING VERTICAL, French writer-director Alain Guiraudie’s new provocative and genre-defying character study about a filmmaker struggling with creativity, responsibility, fatherhood, and sexuality. A selection of the 2016 Cannes Film Festival competition and the New York Film Festival, STAYING VERTICAL is scheduled to open in New York on Friday, January 20 at The Film Society of Lincoln Center and the IFC Center, followed by a national roll out.

Léo (Damien Bonnard), a blocked filmmaker seeking inspiration in the French countryside for an overdue script, begins an affair with a shepherdess (India Hair), with whom he almost immediately has a child. Combining the formal control of his 2013 breakthrough Stranger by the Lake with the shape-shifting fabulism of his earlier work, Alain Guiraudie’s new film, which often veers towards surreal black comedy, is a sidelong look at the human cycle of birth, procreation, and death, as well as his boldest riff on his signature subjects of freedom and desire.

Alain Guiraudie, one of French cinema’s most singular voices, works in and around his home region of Aveyron in the south of France. He was honored by the Film Society of Lincoln Center in 2014 with a two-week complete survey of his work, a series which included That Old Dream That Moves (New York Film Festival), No Rest for the Brave, The King of Escape, and Stranger by the Lake, which won the Cannes Film Festival’s Un Certain Regard Best Director Award as well as the Queer Palm.

“Gorgeously shot... ’Staying Vertical’ offers a consistent world rich with possible meanings.”  — Eric Kohn, Indiewire

“Guiraudie’s latest feature, finds an ideal balance between light surrealism and formal precision, so that nearly every scene fulfills the standard criterion for a great ending: surprising plus inevitable.”  A.V. Club, Mike D'Angelo