Coon, James Anchor 'The Liberation' at Telluride Premiere — SkimNews
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- 'The Liberation' had its World Premiere Friday night at the Telluride Film Festival in front of a packed audience, with the 2-hour-4-minute film distributed by Bleecker Street and dedicated to the late founder Andrew Karpen.
- Guy Nattiv wrote and directed the film as a fiction inspired by his own grandmother, a Holocaust survivor who decades ago drifted away from her family after falling under the influence of a woman ten years younger running what the family later recognized as a cult.
- Carrie Coon stars as Rita Cooper, a New Jersey bank manager and sole survivor of her Polish family from a Nazi concentration camp, who is seduced into joining an all-female rural commune run by Lily James's character.
- Lily James plays Ricki, the bewitching cult leader who rejects conventional medicine and ultimately convinces Rita to abandon her family, in a role the reviewer calls her 'career high point.'
- Bella Ramsey and Odessa Young play Rita's daughters Ella and Jo, who infiltrate the commune without their father's knowledge in a subplot that pivots the film into a pulse-pounding thriller during Jo's health emergency.
- Tracy Letts co-stars as Reuben, Rita's husband — and Coon's real-life husband — lending an extra meta dimension to their on-screen marital conflict over the cult's encroachment.
- IndieWire has already framed the Telluride bow as a launch of Coon into the Oscar race, pairing 'The Liberation' with Andrew Scott's 'Elsinore' as two festival vehicles repositioning TV stars for awards-season contention.
Why it matters: The Telluride premiere locks in 'The Liberation' as an immediate awards-season play, with IndieWire explicitly naming Coon an Oscar contender within hours of the screening. For Bleecker Street, the debut arrives as the company's first major release since founder Andrew Karpen's death, with the film dedicated to him — making the commercial stakes and the emotional stakes unusually aligned.
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