Angels and Insects

United Kingdom, United States

1995

116 Min

Color

1.85:1

English

Currently 3.3/5 Stars.
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PROD Belinda Haas, Joyce Herlihy, Kerry Orent

SCR Belinda Haas, Philip Haas, A.S. Byatt

CAST Mark Rylance, Kristin Scott Thomas, Patsy Kensit, Jeremy Kemp, Douglas Henshall, Annette Badland, Chris Larkin, Anna Massey, Saskia Wickham

MUSIC Alexander Bălănescu

Cannes (In Competition), Toronto (Special Presentations), London, Stockholm (Open Zone), Sundance (Premieres)

Synopsis

The movie is a study of an aristocratic family in the Victorian England. William Adamson, a young scientist, is introduced into the aristocratic family Alabaster by Reverend Alabaster who is also fascinated by insects. William marries the older daughter of the family and studies the amounts of insects in the garden of the villa. His – for the aristocrats – strange behaviours reveal at the same time their own failures and passions. —Volker Boehm

Director

Philip Haas

Philip Haas (born 1954) is an American artist, screenwriter and filmmaker, perhaps best known for his 1995 film Angels and Insects.

He began his career as a documentary film maker, lensing ten profiles of unusual artists through the 1980s with the theme “Magicians of the Earth.”Over the years he has tended to work closely with his wife, Belinda Haas, who shares credit as writer on several of his films. In 2000 they worked on a biographical film on the silent film star Louise Brooks. That project has yet to come to fruition.

His feature film Angels and Insects, set in Victorian England, was nominated for an Academy Award, The Blood Oranges which featured Sheryl Lee, an adaptation of the W. Somerset Maugham novel, Up at the Villa, and The Situation, a political thriller released in 2006. Other feature films include the highly regarded The Music of Chance (1993), and Up at the Villa, starring Sean Penn, Anne Bancroft and Kristin Scott Thomas.

In 2008 the Sonnabend… read more

Philip Haas (born 1954) is an American artist, screenwriter and filmmaker, perhaps best known for his 1995 film Angels and Insects.

He began his career as a documentary film maker, lensing ten profiles of unusual artists through the 1980s with the theme “Magicians of the Earth.”Over the years he has tended to work closely with his wife, Belinda Haas, who shares credit as writer on several of his films. In 2000 they worked on a biographical film on the silent film star Louise Brooks. That project has yet to come to fruition.

His feature film Angels and Insects, set in Victorian England, was nominated for an Academy Award, The Blood Oranges which featured Sheryl Lee, an adaptation of the W. Somerset Maugham novel, Up at the Villa, and The Situation, a political thriller released in 2006. Other feature films include the highly regarded The Music of Chance (1993), and Up at the Villa, starring Sean Penn, Anne Bancroft and Kristin Scott Thomas.

In 2008 the Sonnabend Gallery of New York featured a film installation called The Butcher’s Shop, commissioned by the Kimbell Art Museum, in which Haas recreated the space depicted in Annibale Carracci’s 1582 painting of the same name. In 2010, he expanded this series to include works by Ensor and Tiepolo. His exhibition of film installations at the Kimbell Art Museum, “Butchers, Dragons, Gods and Skeletons,” was listed by TIME magazine as one of the top ten museum shows of 2009

Retrospectives of his art films have been held at the Tate Gallery in London, the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris, Lincoln Center in New York, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. He received a Guggenheim Fellowship for this body of work. In 2008 and 2010, he had one-man shows of paintings and film installations at the Sonnabend Gallery. in New York City. Haas’s 15 feet (4.6 m), fiberglass sculpture Winter (after Arcimboldo) was unveiled in the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. in September, 2010, before traveling in 2011 to the Piazza delDuomo in Milan and the Garden of Versailles.

He taught at the Visual Arts program at Princeton University for two semesters, from spring 2007 to fall 2007, teaching documentary film and screenwriting. Haas lives with his wife and their two daughters in Tribeca in New York City. —Wikipedia

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