What happens when a director with a taste for excess tells the story of a broken family among the ultra-rich? With his latest film, Rosebush Pruning, Brazilian director Karim Aïnouz turns a dysfunctional clan into a zeitgeist fable about wealth, morality, and trauma. After the mysterious death of their mother, siblings Jack, Ed, Anna, and Robert seal themselves off with their blind father in a world of expat luxury. In their secluded villa in the hills above Barcelona, there is no internet access and no television, leaving plenty of time to drift into boredom and power games as the sun goes down. Too rich to have to work and too spoiled to care about anything beyond themselves, they live by their own rules in a Cartier-plated cage.

The script, by Efthimis Filippou (best known for collaborations with Yorgos Lanthimos, including The Lobster), is a straightforward anti-capitalist critique, and Robin Hood logic gives way to a spectacle of contradictions. Rosebush Pruning lingers over these abysses in such ravishing images that the audience can hardly look away from the seductive decadence of the Spanish estate and its beautiful inhabitants. The result is a satire without a clear villain, a fairy tale with an unreliable narrator, in short: Succession in psychedelic colors. With Callum Turner, Lukas Gage, Riley Keough, and Elle Fanning, the cast reads like a who’s who of young Hollywood. On Aïnouz’s screen, they are at their best as characters who float above it all, not just topographically. Aïnouz does not need a force of nature to bring down the villa, and the fantasies that come with it, in the hills of Catalonia. Everyone knows the air that high is thin, and the facade will crack on its own if you look long enough. And you can do exactly that from 23.04.2026, when Mubi’s new film opens in cinemas across Germany.

Text: Laura Storfner / Photos: Robyn Steffen / Credit: Mubi

Rosebush Pruning

@mubideutschland

Blondes are supposed to have more fun. Blonde is a hair color onto which an entire universe of stereotypes has been projected. With Four Non Blondes, a production by the Christoph Winkler dance theatre company at Radialsystem, the troupe sets out to untangle them. What does it mean to move through the world as a blonde? And how does a person change beneath that head of hair when it is tamed, combed or dyed? Strawberry, honey, caramel — these are not my latest Starbucks orders, but shades of blonde. Each of them promises something that is never written on the box: youth, desirability, self-determination. Blondness has carried these associations for centuries. It is celebrated, judged and endlessly commented on. At the same time, it is deeply entangled with ideas of whiteness. Christoph Winkler first explored this in 2024, and now, after international guest performances, Four Non Blondes returns to Berlin. On stage, four non-blonde performers and a singer come together to approach the blonde myth from multiple angles.

Lisa Rykena works as a dancer and choreographer and has developed formats of audio description in dance in collaboration with blind and sighted artists. Sophie Prins brings together dance, music and visual design in an interdisciplinary practice. Shelmith Øseth draws on experience from the Scandinavian dance scene, while Mariana Tzouda trained at the Greek National School of Dance and has performed internationally. Their different perspectives feed into Four Non Blondes as a choreographic concert. Digital images and projections respond to the action on stage and accompany the performers in their exploration of blondness as projection, fantasy and cultural code. Kyle Kidd provides the voice of the evening, shaped by gospel, soul and jazz, while music for the production comes from Tian Rotteveel. Christoph Winkler himself is one of the most distinctive and versatile figures in Berlin’s independent dance scene. Since the 1990s, his work has often unfolded where performance meets social and political questions. The result can sometimes feel like a danced political essay. At Radialsystem, he turns his attention to blondness as myth, stereotype and longing. If you are blonde, come by. If not, all the more reason to.

Text: Emma Zylla / Photos: Dieter Hartwig

Radialsystem, Holzmarktstr.33, 10243 Berlin–Friedrichshain; map

Four Non Blondes 30.04.2026 20h. More dates (01., 02. & 03.05.2026) found here.

@radialsystem_berlin