Jane Campion’s ‘The Power of the Dog’ added to AFI FEST red carpet premieres

Jane Campion’s award-winning film will screen at the TCL Chinese Theatre on November 11

Today, the American Film Institute (AFI) announced that critically acclaimed The Power of the Dog, written and directed by Academy Award winner Jane Campion, has been added to the AFI FEST 2021 lineup.

The film had its world premiere at the Venice Film Festival (review) where Campion received the Silver Lion Award for directing. The film stars Academy Award nominee Benedict Cumberbatch, Kristen Dunst, Jesse Plemons, Kodi Smit-McPhee, Frances Conroy, Thomasin McKenzie, Geneviève Lemon and Academy Award winner Keith Carradine.

Severe, pale-eyed, handsome, Phil Burbank is brutally beguiling. All of Phil’s romance, power and fragility is trapped in the past and in the land: He can castrate a bull calf with two swift slashes of his knife; he swims naked in the river, smearing his body with mud. He is a cowboy as raw as his hides. The year is 1925. The Burbank brothers are wealthy ranchers in Montana. At the Red Mill restaurant on their way to market, the brothers meet Rose, the widowed proprietress, and her impressionable son Peter. Phil behaves so cruelly he drives them both to tears, revelling in their hurt and rousing his fellow cowhands to laughter – all except his brother George, who comforts Rose then returns to marry her. As Phil swings between fury and cunning, his taunting of Rose takes an eerie form – he hovers at the edges of her vision, whistling a tune she can no longer play. His mockery of her son is more overt, amplified by the cheering of Phil’s cowhand disciples. Then Phil appears to take the boy under his wing. Is this latest gesture a softening that leaves Phil exposed, or a plot twisting further into menace?

2021 AFI FEST announces full lineup

A See-Saw Films, Bad Girl Creek and Max Films production in association with Brightstar, The New Zealand Film Commission, Cross City Films and BBC Film, The Power of the Dog is produced by Jane Campion, Tanya Seghatchian, Emile Sherman, Iain Canning and Roger Frappier. The film will be released in theaters on November 17 and on Netflix December 3.

The Power of the Dog joins the previously announced lineup and red carpet premieres of tick, tick…BOOM! directed by Pulitzer Prize and Tony Award winner Lin-Manuel Miranda will open the festival and King Richard directed by Reinaldo Marcus Green will close the festival.  Additional Red Carpet Premieres include the World Premieres of Academy Award winner Halle Berry’s directorial debut Bruised and Academy Award winner Benjamin Cleary’s feature directorial debut Swan Song, and Parallel Mothers, directed by Academy Award winner Pedro Almodóvar.

AFI FEST 2021 takes place from November 10 – 14, 2021 in Los Angeles and will be a hybrid festival featuring both in-person screenings and events, as well as virtual screenings. With health and safety being top priority, AFI FEST 2021 will require all festival-goers who attend in-person events and/or screenings to be fully vaccinated.