ROME.- Riverrun is a portrait that turns into a landscape. Lucy H is overwhelmed; her psychiatrist, Dr Cruz, sends her to a remote clinic in Spain for observation. A chance encounter with Tony upends her sense of self, setting her on a journey beyond treatment and towards unfamiliar realms of existence.
Philippe Parreno’s Riverrun will receive its world premiere at the 21st Rome Film Festival on 24 October 2026 in the Freestyle Section. Starring an international cast led by Charlotte Gainsbourg, with Zo Saldaa, Vicky Krieps and Angela Molina, Riverrun is an intense and visionary journey exploring the fragility of the body and identity, transformation, and the search for the self. The film will be released in Italy in spring 2027 by Filmclub Distribuzione and Minerva Pictures.
Written and directed by Philippe Parreno, Riverrun features cinematography by Maceo Bishop and an original score by his long-term collaborators Invisible Mountain (Nicolas Becker and LEXX).
Director’s Statement
“Riverrun is a portrait that turns into a landscape. The figure in the foreground slowly merges with the background, or perhaps the background rises to meet her.
Lucy H. comes to us as a fictional character struggling to exist. She tries to become incarnate, to acquire the substance and presence of a person. Yet the more Lucy attempts to become a person, the more she ceases to be a character. It is through her efforts to exist as an individual that she gradually dissolves into something else. A being renounces centrality and accepts being no longer a sovereign subject, but continuity, duration, landscape. This paradox is at the heart of the film: the character becomes an entity that dissolves through her very efforts to become a person. It is precisely this radical and empathetic gesture that frees us from explanatory moments and allows the film to embrace a form of narrative opacity.
If accepting depression means slowing down to the pace of geology, and understanding emotion no longer as crisis but as climate, then we have already escaped the vast trap of spectacular resilience, especially the kind staged through therapy.
To become a landscape, to leave the narrative of the self, to dissolve the figure. As in our own lives, we wander through this film, through zones of shadow and indeterminacy, just as we do in a landscape. We never know whether it is calm, threatening, consoling, or indifferent. To accept becoming landscape is not to disappear. It is a chosen desubjectivation, almost a strategy for survival. To cease being a figure and become a milieu, a river”. Phillipe Parreno
Director’s Biography
Philippe Parreno (b. 1964, Grenoble, France) is one of the most influential artists of his generation. He rose to prominence in the 1990’s by radically redefining what it means to ‘experience’ art, turning the dynamics of an exhibition into a situational process. His works have been exhibited and are held in the collections of some of the world’s most prestigious museums and foundations, including MoMA in New York, The Armory, Fondation Beyeler, LUMA Foundation, Tate Modern, Centre Georges Pompidou, The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, among others. Parreno is celebrated above all for his intimate cinematic portraits, including the legendary footballer Zinedine Zidane in Zidane: A 21st Century Portrait (2006), Marilyn Monroe in Marilyn (2012), an undocumented boy living on his own in New York’s Chinatown in Invisible Boy (2010) and the manga cartoon character Annlee in Anywhere Out of the World (2000). With Riverrun (2026), he returns with a portrait of a woman, a film of striking tenderness and character.
In Zidane: A 21st Century Portrait (2006), co-directed with artist Douglas Gordon, the artists trained 17 cameras on legendary footballer Zinedine Zidane. Distributed by Universal and presented in the Official Selection of the 2006 Cannes Film Festival, the 2006 Toronto International Film Festival and the 2007 Sundance Film Festival, the film was also nominated for a Csar in 2007 and received widespread critical and public acclaim around the world. The film went on to win the New Vision Award (2006) and was also nominated for a Csar Award (2007). Most recently, on the occasion of the film's twentieth anniversary and the 2026 World Cup hosted in North America, Zidane was presented at the Guggenheim Museum in New York.
Marilyn (2012) conjured Marilyn Monroe through a phantasmagoric sance that was staged at the Waldorf Astoria hotel in New York – home to the actress during the 1950s. The film attempted, for the first time, to digitally reproduce Marilyn Monroe’s voice. Parreno uses three algorithms to bring to life Marilyn Monroe’s presence: the camera becomes her eyes; a computer reconstructs the prosody of her voice and a robot recreates her handwriting in a portrait that is something resembling a human, and yet not quite real. Marilyn continues to be presented in galleries and museums throughout the world to this day.
Invisible Boy (2010) is a portrait of an undocumented Chinese boy who lives alone in a small apartment in New York’s Chinatown. The film combines documentary footage and animation to portray the young boy and his imagined visitations from ghosts and monsters as he attempts to create daily rituals within his confined space. The soundtrack, which used live transmissions from various sites in Chinatown, was created by Nicolas Becker.
Anywhere Out of the World (2000) In 1999 Parreno bought the rights to a Japanese manga cartoon character which he renamed “Annlee”. He then transferred the copyright character herself, in effect granting a fictional being ownership of its own image. AnnLee is a melancholy figure whose presence is deliberately ambiguous, designed to remain a simulated reality. Beyond raising questions around copyright and authorship, the artwork reflects on how identity is defined, and by whom, in the contemporary era.
Over the course of his artistic career Parreno has received countless honours and awards. The artist has been honoured at the Locarno Film Festival multiple times over the years for his outstanding contribution to film. In 2014 the artist was appointed as an Officer of the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in recognition of his significant contribution to the arts. 2015 saw the artist honoured by the Sculpture Center in New York. In 2019, Parreno was invited to participate in the 48th International Film Festival in Rotterdam (IFFR) where he presented the film work No More Reality Whereabouts (2019).
