Press

Review of feature film, The World to Come. “The setting is stunning (the film was shot on 16mm in Romania), but The World to Come never succumbs to period-drama prettifying. Nature is a seen as a wild, threatening force — Tallie's trek through a blizzard is captured with cacophonous nightmarishness — wielding as much power over the characters' lives as their own choices.”

Review of feature film, The World to Come. “It would be easy to sell The World to Come as ‘the female Brokeback Mountain’, but that would be to traduce the richness, singularity and command of Mona Fastvold’s beautifully executed and acted drama. The story of female friendship blossoming into passionate love in a severe 1850s American rural setting, this is an austere but lyrical piece underwritten by a complex grasp of emotional and psychological nuance, and a second feature of striking command by Norwegian-born director Mona Fastvold, following up her 2014 debut The Sleepwalker (she has also collaborated as writer on Brady Corbet’s features).”

Coverage of feature film, The World to Come, at the 2020 Venice International Film Festival. “Framed by the four seasons, The World To Come centers on Abigail (Waterston), a farmer’s wife, and her new neighbor Tallie (Kirby) find themselves powerfully, irrevocably drawn to each other.”

Interview with Mona Fastvold about feature film, The World to Come. “Ron Hansen and Jim Shepard’s script was beautiful. Rich in historical detail, it is both a precise chronicle of farm life in the 19th century, as well as an engrossing character study of four second-generation Americans. The characters jumped out at me and I felt compelled to tell their story.”

Coverage of Vanessa Kirby and her films at the 2020 Venice Film Festival, one of which is The World to Come. “With The World to Come and Piece of a Woman, filmed almost back-to-back in late 2019 and early 2020, the British star, 32, has the rare honor of having two films compete against each other in the Biennale, the first A-list film festival to physically take place since cinemas — and much beyond — shut their doors. Appearing alongside Katherine Waterston and Casey Affleck in The World to Come — a frontier romance set against the rugged and patriarchal terrain of the mid-19th century American Northeast — Kirby plays flame-haired Tallie, who sparks an intense and liberating affair with a farmer’s wife, played by Waterston.”

Coverage of the 2020 Venice Film Festival, with an interview with The World to Come’s director Mona Fastvold. “Based on a Jim Shepard story, Fastvold’s ‘The World to Come’ is about two women, married to farmers, who fall in love in the 1850s New York. ‘It’s about this very intense intellectual and emotional and physical connection between two women (played by Kirby and Waterston),’ Fastvold said. ‘People would ask me, why do you want to tell the story about normal women falling in love with one another. And I said, well, I do think that there should be a place in history for the quiet ones as well. Not just the great icons. Not just the Napoleons.’”

Interview with Vanessa Kirby, who has two films at the 2020 Venice Film Festival, one of which is The World to Come. “I ignorantly didn’t know that life was like that in some parts of America in the 1800s. It isn’t that long ago when things were just so tied in. You were literally owned by your household, by the man that you happened to be married to. I just found it so moving, and it touched me so deeply, and the thought that you can’t choose who you love and you can’t even choose to do what you like, to love who you want. I also love the title The World To Come, because it was from those foundations that we’re still coming out of, really. And I found it beautifully poetic.”

Coverage of the 2020 Venice Film Festival, with reference to feature film, The World to Come. “Against the odds, Barbera has pulled together an impressive selection of new films for Venice 2020. Searchlight Pictures’ Nomadland, the Chloé Zhao-directed road movie starring Frances McDormand and David Strathairn, and Sony’s The World to Come, from director Mona Fastvold and featuring Casey Affleck, Vanessa Kirby and Katherine Waterston, both will have their world premieres on the Lido.”

Coverage of the 2020 Venice Film Festival, with reference to feature film, The World to Come. “Although the slimmed-down line-up is short on Hollywood heavyweights (2019’s, for instance, included Marriage Story and Joker), it’s packed with indie darlings, awards hopefuls and boundary-pushing arthouse gems from around the world. Significantly, 44 per cent of the films competing for its top prize, the Golden Lion, have been directed by women.”

Coverage of the 2020 Venice Film Festival, with reference to feature film, The World to Come. “Women directors are behind some of the most buzzworthy titles in Venice this year, including Nomadland from Chloé Zhao, a road movie starring Frances McDormand; period drama The World to Come by Mona Fastvold, featuring Vanessa Kirby, Katherine Waterston, Casey Affleck and Christopher Abbott; and Never Gonna Snow Again from acclaimed Polish filmmaker Malgorzata Szumowska (co-directed with Michal Englert). Nicole Garcia's French drama Lovers, Susanna Nicchiarelli's Miss Marx, Le Sorelle Macaluso from Emma Dante, Julia Von Heinz's And Tomorrow the Entire World, and Quo Vadis, Aida? from Bosnian filmmaker Jasmila Zbanic (Grbavica: The Land of My Dreams) complete the list.”