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2025 Sep 08

Cate Blanchett at Venice Film Festival; Father Mother Sister Brother wins Golden Lion

Written by Ellan
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Jim Jarmusch’s FATHER MOTHER SISTER BROTHER wins the Golden Lion for Best Film at the 82nd Venice Film Festival. The film will have its London premiere at the BFI London Film Festival on 18 October. Tickets go on sale to public on 16 September, members can book theirs now here.

Cate Blanchett attends the festival for the premiere of the new Jarmusch film, and as Armani Beauty Global Brand Ambassador.

She walked the red carpet on Day 1 of the festival for the opening ceremony and film La Grazia by Paolo Sorrentino. For the following days, Armani hosted dinners with Armani Beauty ambassadors and guests. On Sunday, 31 August, Jim Jarmusch’s triptych film FATHER MOTHER SISTER BROTHER premiered to positive reviews.

Armani Beauty

The official sponsor of the festival hosted its annual event on Friday night, this time choosing one of the city’s grandest and most historic buildings. Alongside Armani Beauty brand ambassadors Cate Blanchett, bushy-bearded Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Sadie Sink, Nathalie Emmanuel and Madisin Rian.

While some of these talent had made the trip for Armani festivities, others also have movies playing at Venice, notably Blanchett, who’s presenting Jim Jarmusch’s next feature “Father Mother Sister Brother” in competition, and Woodley, who’s on the Lido with Potsy Ponciroli’s “Motor City.”

 

Armani/Archivio, a vast digital repository of thousands of original looks from Giorgio Armani’s women’s and men’s collections (soon to be joined by a physical space near Milan), went live over the weekend. Employees of the Armani Group will have full access, while the public is invited to explore an inaugural selection of 57 looks. The project also revives and celebrates iconic pieces from historic collections: a series of carefully preserved garments, chosen for their enduring relevance, is reintroduced to engage new generations of admirers. After Venice, where they were displayed at the local Armani boutique with a dedicated cocktail reception, these pieces will travel the world through a series of store presentations.

As announced, the 50th-anniversary celebrations will culminate during Milan Fashion Week with the opening on September 24 of an exhibition at the Pinacoteca di Brera, presenting 150 Giorgio Armani looks in dialogue with the museum’s artworks. The week will conclude with a runway show in the Courtyard of Honour at Palazzo Brera, unveiling the Giorgio Armani Women’s Spring/Summer 2026 collection alongside select men’s looks from June’s presentation.

Last night, the house unveiled its Armani/Archivio platform during the Venice Film Festival with all the flair of a premiere, trading the red carpet for a dinner benefiting UNICEF’s Global Humanitarian Thematic Fund at Venissa, the Michelin-starred haven on the romantic island of Mazzorbo. The setting was pure Italian cinema: an elegant, secluded lagoon; shimmering Murano glass; soft candlelight.

Armani Beauty Dinners – Day 3 & 4
Dinner Photoshoot


Opening ceremony and Father Mother Sister Brother

Synopsis: Father Mother Sister Brother is a feature film, though carefully constructed in the form of a triptych. The three stories all concern the relationships between adult children, their somewhat distant parent (or parents) and each other. Each of the three chapters takes place in the present, and each in a different country.

Father is set in the north-east US, Mother in Dublin, Ireland, and Sister Brother in Paris, France. The film is a series of character studies: quiet, observational and non-judgemental — a comedy, but interwoven with threads of melancholy.

 

The Venice Film Festival set the table for Jim Jarmusch‘s Father Mother Sister Brother by delivering the Mubi title’s world premiere on the Lido Sunday night.

The filmmaker joined his stars Cate Blanchett, Charlotte Rampling, Vicky Krieps, Mayim Bialik, Luka Sabbat and Indya Moore for the red carpet festivities at Sala Grande with only Adam Driver and Tom Waits missing in action. (During the film’s press conference earlier in the afternoon, Bialik confirmed they couldn’t make this year’s festival.)

And the capacity crowd responded with a warm standing ovation that lasted for five minutes, and would’ve continued had the cast and auteur not exited early amid the applause. Early in the applause, Krieps hugged Jarmusch and could be heard saying, “It’s so good, it’s so good.”

During Sunday’s official Venice Film Festival press conference, Jarmusch quipped, “I don’t know where the hell it came from” when asked how he came up with the idea for such a project.

“I usually carry ideas around for a year or more, sometimes many years, before I finally write very fast in a number of weeks. I wrote this in like three weeks. I don’t know really where it comes from,” he explained, adding that he hopes people consume all three chapters in one sitting rather than divide it up. “If you were to show one chapter without the others, I would be mortified because I worked very, very hard to do it with this structure.”

Reviews

When we think of the canon of important voices in American independent film, Jim Jarmusch is one of the most notable names. He bridged the gap from the final stages of New Hollywood to the budding origins of the independent movement that he helped define, almost to the point where he’s viewed as a patron saint of small, intimate productions that reject the mainstream wherever possible. His directorial output over the last decade has sadly become quite slow, with only three productions in the last ten years, which means that we cherish every new opportunity to see the world through his distinctly sardonic, unwaveringly strange perspective. This is where we find a lot of value in Father Mother Sister Brother, an anthology film in which Jarmusch – as suggested by the title – tells three stories, each one revolving around different family members as they meet for what they hope will be just pleasant encounters, but which turn into something much deeper as they confront unresolved tensions and address issues that might have been better left unspoken. A simple premise rendered in an even more direct way than we’d expect, Father Mother Sister Brother is another strong offering from Jarmusch, even if he’s retreading familiar territory throughout.

Father Mother Sister Brother is a film constructed entirely around exploring the different configurations of families, telling three separate stories that are only marginally related. The first finds a pair of siblings visiting their down-on-his-luck father in rural New Jersey, hoping to give him some company. The second revolves around an annual tea party between a persnickety mother in Dublin and her two daughters, one a socially awkward intellectual, the other a free-spirited rebel. The third follows siblings as they visit the Paris apartment of their deceased parents, clearing it out of the belongings and memories that are inextricably tied to this place. Each of the vignettes is formed around examining the dynamic between these individuals as they share the same space with people whom they perhaps know better than anyone else, but with whom they struggle to connect on a deeper level, primarily because they’re not willing to address the unresolved issues that forced them apart in the first place.

Despite being about difficult conversations, such as loneliness, marital strife, sibling rivalry and grief, Father Mother Sister Brother is a surprisingly light, heartwarming work. It’s not an elaborate affair, and it finds Jarmusch working in perhaps his most minimalistic form yet (at least since his earliest works), but it does build itself around some clear emotional concepts that may not be revolutionary on their own, but nonetheless have enough merit to draw the viewer in. It also allows Jarmusch to play on one of his favourite themes, albeit not always appreciated by those who aren’t able to leap onto his wavelength: awkwardness and discomfort.

This is certainly a very straightforward film, with the direction being as minimalist as it could be (and often plays like a stage production more than a film), and which will likely not appeal to those expecting a more exciting, complex work. However, this feels like the most fitting approach for something so sincerely intrigued by the human condition and its many peculiar qualities, which Jarmusch addresses beautifully throughout this film, working closely with a cast of excellent actors who help him develop these intriguing characters, and allowing Father Mother Sister Brother to flourish into one of the year’s most lovely, gentle films about a subject that takes on many forms, but is nonetheless extremely recognisable in any context.

Full review on ICS

 

In appearing to give you nothing, Jim Jarmusch‘s almost perversely downplayed trio of short stories “Father Mother Sister Brother” winds up giving you almost everything if you can tap into its cool vibrations.

“Father Mother Sister Brother” is about as dry as a physical copy of short stories you’ve loved since you were a child. There are no protagonists or antagonists, just people moving through life, Jarmusch catching moments of them the way that David Lynch once caught ideas like fish moving down a stream. This is a movie Lynch would’ve admired, brittly funny and content to linger in doorways and thresholds for as long as it takes until somebody breaks the awkward silence.

Full review on Indiewire

 

The movie is divided into three (apparently) unrelated panels of drama, events taking place in parallel in three different parts of the world: rural US, Dublin and Paris, and with images and gestures that fortuitously echo each other.

In Dublin, Charlotte Rampling plays a characteristically self-possessed and self-assured woman who is welcoming her two grownup daughters for their annual visit for tea. She is entirely content to make these visits a rarity. They are the trendy Lilith (Vicky Krieps) with pink hair, and the more staid and uptight Tim, played, a little stagily, by Cate Blanchett, with glasses and sensible shoes.

The movie returns us to an age-old question: who are or were our parents? Did they have real existences before we were born that we will never understand? And are our own existences destined to be effaced and rendered irrelevant or taboo by our own children? For me, the first and third sections are the most naturalistically convincing as portraits of real life, the second is more theatrical, although the weird, slyly comic echoes of each other in each of the sections undermine or at least complicate this reality effect. You might sit through this film waiting for a crisis or a confrontation: some explosion of temper or passionate demand for honesty. None will arrive. Basically, there is a contentment and calm here, an acceptance and a Zen simplicity that is a cleansing of the moviegoing palate, or perhaps the fiction-consuming palate in general. It is a film to savour.

Full review on The Guardian

 

The song “Spooky,” that catchy little anthem about being befuddled by love, plays twice in Jim Jarmusch‘s lovely triptych melancomedy “Father Mother Sister Brother.” Its laid-back, liquid rhythms are a perfect mood-setter for a film that also understands that loving someone doesn’t mean you know them all that well. Here, the affection is not romantic but familial, flowing in soft, subliminal waves between parents and their adult children. But that our encounters with our moms and dads as grown-ups may have a lot in common — in their white lies, face-saving tactics and loaded silences — with the early stages of a love affair is one of the peculiar observations that makes this such an unusually delightful hangout movie. The kind you might go and see in the cool of the evening when everything is getting kind of groovy.

Full review on Variety

 

Of the three vignettes, I’m fondest of the middle story in which Krieps plays Lilith, the free-spirited sister of Blanchett’s buttoned-up Timothea, a public servant who has just landed a job at the heritage society. Seeing the two actresses spar while Rampling inquisitively watches on is probably worth the entry.

Full review on The FilmStage

 

Ravishingly framed and lit by two DoPs at the top of their games – Frederick Elmes, who shot ’Father’, and Yorick Le Saux, who took on the other two parts, ’Mother’ and ’Sister Brother’ – Jarmusch’s latest requires patience. It’s a film that takes its own sweet time; audiences are encouraged to to contemplate, to pick up loose threads and tie them together.

‘Mother’ follows another parental duty visit – that of two mismatched sisters, Cate Blanchett’s prim and proper Tim (short for Timothea) and Vicky Krieps’ flamboyant, pink-haired Lilith, to their impeccably bourgeois mother (Charlotte Rampling), who has invited her daughters for tea – a formal, stilted sit-down affair with beautifully cut sandwiches and a bewildering array of cutlery.

The director’s latest has a lot to say about families and generational relationships, but this is also a film of quiet charm, anchored by a scatter of joyful performances. Cate Blanchett plays Tim as if she’s Julie Andrews cast in a Harold Pinter play, Tom Waits has great fun dosing out the gradual audience revelation that he’s an elderly teenager wondering how his boring-as-hell kids got so old, while Indya Moore and Luka Sabbat smoulder as cool, cosmopolitan twins who know each other as well as they know themselves.

Full review on ScreenDaily

 

[Mother] following two sisters on their yearly trip across Dublin for tea with dear Mama (Charlotte Rampling). Timothea (Cate Blanchett), tucked behind a bowl-cut and oversized glasses, has the look of a turtle – and she’d just as soon retreat into her shell, especially around family. Lilith (Vicky Krieps), with a shock-pink mane perfectly matched to her outfit, instead hides in plain sight, barreling through Ma’s house and questions like a walking exclamation point.

“Father Mother Sister Brother” can sometimes feel like a pictorial brought to life by a particularly prestigious cast. The effect lands hardest (and distracts least) in the second segment, which follows a catty clan that favors sartorial flair, all played by Grande Dames clearly reveling in the camp. Rampling, Blanchett, and Krieps ricochet off one another, trading glances and barbs like dollhouse gladiators in passive-aggressive bloodsport. Though you wouldn’t want them as kin, they put on a good show.

Full review on The Wrap

 

Jim Jarmusch has been doing his idiosyncratic thing for so long we sometimes take him for granted. But then he comes along with a film as delicate and lovely, as singular and perfectly realized as Father Mother Sister Brother and quietly floors you.

What a pleasure to see a study of family relationships so entirely unconcerned with banal platitudes, emotional calculation or trite “relatability,” that most hackneyed of perceived attributes. This is not bland comfort food. Instead, what makes the triptych of thematically connected snapshots memorable is its deftly unfussy observation of the unknowability that can endure among people who share the same bloodlines.

The second part, Mother, features Charlotte Rampling as a chilly English author living in Dublin, where her daughters — prim Timothea (Blanchett) and pink-haired wild child Lilith (Vicky Krieps) — have moved to be closer to her and yet see her once a year for afternoon tea. A phone session with her therapist before they arrive suggests this is an annual appointment she could live without.

The sisters arrive from different parts of the city, Tim, as she’s called, after some car trouble and Lilith in a vehicle driven by her good-humored Irish girlfriend Jeanette (Sarah Greene). Knowing her mother will be watching from the front window, Lilith insists on getting in the back for the final block or two so she can pass Jeanette off as an Uber driver. The updates she gives her mother on her personal life might have fragments of truth or be total fabrications.

The chapter plays out almost like an extended scene out of a Mike Leigh film. Tim is diplomatic, attempting to keep the afternoon light and relaxed, while Lilith seems to relish the role of the black sheep, enjoying her mother’s mostly tacit disapproval.

This is a unique portrait of families and their foibles, both amusing and annoying, superbly acted by an exceptional cast fully inhabiting their characters. They’re all so good it’s unfair to single out anyone. The movie is touched by warmth and generosity of spirit even when the people onscreen show little of it. And for a three-part piece, it gains a gorgeous fluidity from the gossamer ribbon of melancholy threaded through it. Like Paterson, it’s a film whose simplicity, sweetness and unvarnished ordinariness make it seem almost a miracle.

Full review on THR

 

True to form, Father Mother Sister Brother brings together an extraordinarily eclectic cast; some of them familiar faces from the Jarmusch cinematic universe, but, trust me, you won’t have seen them quite like this before. Split into three sections, interspersed with trippy light patterns and a plangent avant-garde guitar score by the director himself and frequent collaborator Annika Henderson, it looks at three family units in three time zones, moving slowly east from the nondescript nowheresvilles of north-east America, to Dublin then Paris.

This is a wilfully obscure step back to his [Jarmusch’s] deadpan, experimental roots, a gentle, almost deliberately un-film that is best not viewed in too much proximity to the witching hour. Nothing seems to land, but somehow it lingers; enjoy it or not, Father Mother Sister Brother will worm its way into your brain like false memory syndrome, a fitfully funny, if never laugh-out-loud reminder that you can’t choose your family.

Full review on Deadline

Media

The fourth YouTube link is a playlist so click on the playlist icon to see more videos.

Opening Ceremony Day 1
Day 3
with Julia Roberts
La Biennale Portrait / LV x Venezia
Elle Daily Venezia / Rai News
Photocall
Press Con
Premiere




Sources: Variety, Vogue, La Biennale, THR-Premiere, Sky TG, RaiNews, AP

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