Press

Variety’s 2021 Oscar Predictions, with mention of feature film, The World to Come.

Announcement of feature film, The World to Come. “Bleecker Street has acquired the North American rights to ‘The World to Come,’ a period drama and romance starring Katherine Waterston and Vanessa Kirby that made its premiere at the Venice Film Festival. ‘The World to Come’ is directed by Mona Fastvold and won the Queer Lion Award at the festival and the Fanheart3 Award. Bleecker Street has yet to set release plans.”

Announcement of feature film, The World to Come. “Bleecker Street has bought U.S. rights to Mona Fastvold’s ‘The World to Come,’ a period romance with Katherine Waterston and Vanessa Kirby, rolling off its critically acclaimed premiere in competition at the 77th Venice Film Festival.”

Announcement of feature film, The World to Come. “Bleecker Street has acquired US rights from to Vanessa Kirby period drama The World To Come following its recent world premiere in Venice. The distributor has not set a release date.”

Announcement of feature film, The World to Come. “Bleecker Street has acquired U.S. rights to Mona Fastvold’s “The World to Come,” Variety reports. The period romance premiered to rave reviews at Venice Film Festival earlier this month.”

Profile of Katherine Waterston, with reference to feature film, The World to Come. “She’s worked with every kind of director, on every kind of budget, including her upcoming feature The World to Come, which premiered at the Venice Film Festival last week to rave reviews. Starring alongside Vanessa Kirby, Christopher Abbot, and Casey Affleck, Waterston once again slips into a character and completely disappears.  Like Third Day, The World To Come, based on Jim Shepard’s book by the same name and directed by Mona Fastvol, is about isolation and loneliness.”

Review of feature film, The World to Come.  “In the fall festival derby, everyone was expecting the Kate Winslet-Saoirse Ronan romance ‘Ammonite’ to follow up ‘Portrait of a Lady on Fire’ as the next must-see Sapphic bodice-ripper. (It plays Toronto later this week.) But the lesbian love story to break out first in Venice is actress-writer-director Mona Fastvold’s second movie, ‘The World to Come,’ a grim yet achingly beautiful 1850s pioneer drama about two isolated farm wives (Katherine Waterston and Vanessa Kirby) who escape from their domestic drudgery with each other.

Review of feature film, The World to Come. “As coldly drawn as an atlas yet no less capable of enflaming the imagination, Mona Fastvold’s ‘The World to Come’ is a hard and brittle period love story that thaws into something much warmer — what its hyper-literate heroine would call ‘astonishment and joy’ — as a merciless 19th-century winter blushes into a most unexpected spring.”

Review of feature film, The World to Come. “The World to Come is crafted with care by the Norwegian film-maker Mona Fastvold, lovingly built on ground previously settled by Céline Sciamma’s Portrait of a Lady on Fire. Arguably, the film is too neatly tailored (both in terms of its fashions and its narrative) and maybe even a little too modern in its sensibility, to the point where one wonders whether these rustic 19th-century farmers would have been quite so open and articulate about their innermost feelings – or so bluntly insightful in tackling others’ feelings. But these are quibbles; Fastvold’s romance casts a spell.”

Review of feature film, The World to Come. “Fastvold’s film leans into the measured vernacular and daily routine of the mud-stained 19th-century lives it depicts, finding a satisfying kinship between the hard, gradual blossoming of its chosen landscape and the formal, subtly expressive language of writer Jim Shepard — who has gracefully adapted his own 2017 short story with fellow heartland novelist Ron Hansen (‘The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford’). The exquisite result, premiering in competition at Venice, straddles its own mountain somewhere between the peaks of Cold and Brokeback. Discerning arthouse distributors should take the climb.”