ROSEBUSH PRUNING

ROSEBUSH PRUNING premiered in Competition at the Berlin International Film Festival in February 2026. It’s a dark family satire about inherited wealth, arrested adulthood and what happens when people who’ve built an entire ecosystem around one another suddenly face the possibility of change.

Ed, Jack, Anna and Robert live with their blind father on an extravagant estate in Spain, insulated by inherited money and a family dynamic built on dependency, competition and old resentments. Their mother is dead, but her absence continues to dominate the household. When Jack decides he wants to leave the compound with his girlfriend Martha, the arrangement holding the family together starts to come apart.

Karim Aïnouz loosely reworks Marco Bellocchio’s 1965 debut FISTS IN THE POCKET, one of the key films of postwar Italian cinema. The screenplay comes from Efthimis Filippou, the longtime Yorgos Lanthimos collaborator behind DOGTOOTH, THE LOBSTER and THE KILLING OF A SACRED DEER. That lineage is evident in the film’s deadpan conversations, sexual tension and fascination with people whose enormous privilege has left them with very little understanding of how ordinary life works.

The cast is unusually stacked. Callum Turner, Jamie Bell, Riley Keough and Lukas Gage play the siblings, with Elle Fanning as Martha, Tracy Letts as their father and Pamela Anderson appearing as their late mother. Aïnouz surrounds them with immaculate clothes, architecture and expensive objects, then watches the family behave increasingly badly inside all that good taste.