Director/photographer Polina (Polly) Rabtseva has joined Detour Films for exclusive representation in the U.S. This marks the first production company home for Rabtseva, a Belarus-born filmmaker whose unique visual style has been commissioned for international brands including Mercedes-Benz, Bacardi and Fashion TV–work which she did independently as a freelancer.
Rabtseva is proficient in lighting, camera, editing, sound design and animation. Her modern digital filmmaking embraces a personal touch at every stage of the process. She describes her work as an attempt to distill the purest essence of human emotion through the sculpting of image and sound in time.
Josh Canova, Detour founder and executive producer, described Rabtseva as being “a magnetic, free spirit and gifted artist with an approach that’s pure, unapologetic, and mesmerizing.”
Initially trained as a painter, Rabtseva was drawn to the soft female forms and fantasy settings of Botticelli, Raphael and Michelangelo. Later, as a photographer, she found inspiration in the highly sophisticated, yet raw and seemingly accessible photographic style of Helmut Newton. Rabtseva’s variety of work shows her expanded drive for affectionate storytelling across platforms, individuals, and brands.
Rabtseva said she was “excited to join Detour Films and work alongside such an amazing team of talented and dedicated professionals. I believe that our combined experience and passion for creating beautiful emotive imagery is a perfect foundation for great ideas to bloom.”
Review: Writer-Director Coralie Fargeat’s “The Substance”
In its first two hours, "The Substance" is a well-made, entertaining movie. Writer-director Coralie Fargeat treats audiences to a heavy dose of biting social commentary on ageism and sexism in Hollywood, with a spoonful of sugar- and sparkle-doused body horror.
But the film's deliciously unhinged, blood-soaked and inevitably polarizing third act is what makes it unforgettable.
What begins as a dread-inducing but still relatively palatable sci-fi flick spirals deeper into absurdism and violence, eventually erupting — quite literally — into a full-blown monster movie. Let the viewer decide who the monster is.
Fargeat — who won best screenplay at this year's Cannes Film Festival — has been vocal about her reverence for "The Fly" director David Cronenberg, and fans of the godfather of body horror will see his unmistakable influence. But "The Substance" is also wholly unique and benefits from Fargeat's perspective, which, according to the French filmmaker, has involved extensive grappling with her own relationship to her body and society's scrutiny.
"The Substance" tells the story of Elisabeth Sparkle, a famed aerobics instructor with a televised show, played by a powerfully vulnerable Demi Moore. Sparkle is fired on her 50th birthday by a ruthless executive — a perfectly cast Dennis Quaid, who nails sleazy and gross.
Feeling rejected by a town that once loved her and despairing over her bygone star power, Sparkle learns from a handsome young nurse about a black-market drug that promises to create a "younger, more beautiful, more perfect" version of its user. Though she initially tosses the phone number in the trash, she soon fishes it out in a desperate panic and places an order.
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