SYNOPSIS

This session features a special introduction from filmmaker Jacques Audiard. The award-winning novel The Sisters Brothers gets a cinematic rendering courtesy of filmmaker Jacques Audiard (Dheepan, AF FFF2016). With this melancholic western noir, Audiard also makes a mighty debut in English and showcases a stellar Hollywood line-up. Set in gold rush California of the 1850s, Eli and Charlie Sisters (John C. Reilly and Joaquin Phoenix) are notorious, cold-blooded assassins hired by an Oregon City crime boss, The Commodore (Rutger Hauer), to settle a score. Their contract is to kill a mysterious chemist, Herman Kermit Warm (Riz Ahmed), who’s allegedly perfected a formula that, when poured into a river, makes gold light up. As the brothers travel south to San Francisco leaving a trail of violence and murder in their wake, things take a dramatic turn when another gun-for-hire on the target’s tail, John Morris (Jake Gyllenhaal), decides to team up with Warm. Featuring eye-catching cinematography and outstanding performances by a killer cast blessed with a script replete with salty dialogue, Audiard eschews sentimentality to create a western that is as gritty and entertaining as Quentin Tarantino and Sam Peckinpah at their best.