One of the bright lights of contemporary cinema, Athina Rachel Tsangari won worldwide acclaim for her second feature Attenberg — which left a lasting impression at the Festival in 2010 and produced Yorgos Lanthimos’ Academy Award®–nominated Dogtooth as well as his latest mind-bender, Alps. In addition to her film work, the versatile and fiercely original Tsangari is a successful visual artist noted for her work in large-scale projections.
        In her new film The Capsule, Tsangari delights in the fantasy of high fashion (including that of Montreal avant-garde designer Ying Gao), forging a work that bears her signature stamp but also sees her experimenting like never before. Commissioned by the DESTE Foundation for Contemporary Art, for whom fashion counts as fine art (and why shouldn’t it always?), The Capsule features an ensemble of first-rate (and drop-dead gorgeous) young actresses — including Ariane Lebed from Attenberg and Alps, Aurore Marion from Chantal Akerman’s La folie Almayer, Isolda Dychauk from Alexander Sokurov’s Faust, and Clémence Poésy from the Harry Potter series — in a twisted fairy tale shot in an eighteenth-century mansion on the breathtaking island of Hydra. Inspired by the Goya-like drawings of acclaimed Polish artist Aleksandra Waliszewska (who co-wrote the film), The Capsule is a "Greek Gothic" female romance, a Cycladic distortion of the three "Bs": Brontë, Bataille, and Buñuel.