The Big Picture
- Amanda Seyfried's new film Seven Veils will show at the 2024 Berlin Film Festival and a new image from the feature has been released.
- The movie centers around a director tasked with putting together an opera revival of Salome.
- The film mixes reality and fiction, drawing from director Atom Egoyan's own experiences with the production.
After an early screening at last year’s Toronto Film Festival, art-imitates-life movie Seven Veils starring Amanda Seyfried (The Dropout) has released a new image following the announcement that the movie will integrate the 2024 Berlin Film Festival lineup. The story centers around a director (Seyfried) who is tasked with putting together an opera revival of Richard Strauss’s one-act Salome.
As these types of stories tend to go, real life and art will certainly get mixed up, as the new image from Seven Veils suggests. In it, Seyfried looks shocked as something happens off-screen. Even though the art territory is familiar in cinema, the movie covers a form of art that hardly ever makes it to screens. Opera is often featured in movies and TV shows, but the stories are almost never about opera itself.
Seven Veils is directed by Atom Egoyan, who previously helmed The Captive and Adoration. Egoyan worked with Seyfried back in 2009 with thriller movie Chloe. Back when Seven Veils premiered at TIFF, Egoyan had a lot of praise for his leading lady. He said “Amanda is a phenomenal actress, and here she brilliantly plays a woman dealing with complex and explosive relationships in her past, present, and future."
Life Imitates Art Imitating Life in 'Seven Veils'
The movie also has several layers of fiction and real life mixed up: Egoyan directed a theater production of Salome for the Canadian Opera Company in 1996 and came back in 2023 to direct a revival. So it’s pretty safe to say that a lot of Egoyan’s own experiences will be reflected in Seven Veils.
The cast also features Rebecca Liddiard (Fargo), Douglas Smith (Big Little Lies), Maia Jae Bastidas (Gen V), Ambur Braid (The Upside), Michael Kupfer-Radecky (Violanta), Ryan McDonald (Fringe) and Mark O’Brien (61st Street).
Seven Veils has been pretty well-received in its early screenings: Currently, it stands at an 83% approval rate on Rotten Tomatoes. The exhibition in more film festivals may help with the word-of-mouth success of the movie, which could then translate to a wide theatrical release.
At the Berlin Film Festival, Seven Veils will be screened for competition and is up against other industry heavyweights such as Sebastian Stan in A Different Man, Cillian Murphy in Small Things Like These, Gael García Bernal in Another End and Isabelle Huppert in A Traveler’s Needs. The event takes place from February 15 to 24, and you can check out the full slate of movies that will be screened at the Berlin Film Festival official website.
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