Brazilian director Karim Aïnouz premiered Rosebush Pruning in competition at the Berlin International Film Festival on Feb. 14, bringing a sharply comic portrait of inherited wealth and family rot into a lineup competing for the Golden Bear.
Set in a sprawling Spanish mansion, the film follows four American siblings two years after their mother’s death. Jamie Bell plays Jack, who tries to break away from the household; his siblings, played by Callum Turner, Riley Keough and Lukas Gage, fight to keep the family unit intact, while Jack’s girlfriend, played by Elle Fanning, becomes a flashpoint. The blind patriarch is played by Tracy Letts, and Pamela Anderson appears as the mother in a central absence that still shapes the house’s power dynamics.
At the Berlin press conference, Bell described the tone as “operatic absurdity,” saying the cast leaned into characters who “don’t want for anything” and felt freed by what he called a ruleless creative space. Letts tied the story’s idle privilege to politics, arguing that extreme wealth gaps “breed bad behaviour” and “probably create fascism.” Anderson pointed to a culture of inherited money and “superficiality” as a recognizable target.
The screenplay comes from Efthimis Filippou and draws inspiration from Fists in the Pocket by Marco Bellocchio, placing Aïnouz’s film in a tradition of bourgeois family sabotage. Producers and financiers assembled an international package led by The Match Factory on worldwide sales, with backing that includes MUBI and public funds in Germany, Spain and the U.K.
Early reactions after the premiere have split: some critics praised its visual snap and caustic humor, while others called it sleek but emotionally thin, with shocks that land harder than its social diagnosis.
