Step into the glamorous world where fashion and film collide at the Venice Film Festival, as Miu Miu Women's Tales returns with a dazzling showcase of female creativity. Since 2011, this groundbreaking series has empowered women filmmakers to craft visually stunning short films, all while featuring Miu Miu's latest collections. From martial arts action to mystery plots, the latest films by rising directors Laura Citarella and Chui Mui Tan push boundaries, blending style and storytelling in unforgettable ways. Ready for a front-row seat?
First introduced in September of 2011, the Miu Miu Women’s Tales series began as a passion project for Miuccia Prada who has long been a world cinema aficionado. To date, what remains one of the most consistent commissioning platforms dedicated to women filmmakers, Miu Miu Women’s tales has featured short films by such legendary filmmakers as Ava DuVernay, Agnès Varda, Lynne Ramsay, Zoe Cassavetes (who made the very first short titled The Powder Room) and Lucrecia Martel. But also stories which have launched the more mainstream careers of creatives like Alice Rohrwacher, Kaouther Ben Hania, Haifaa Al-Mansour, Mati Diop, Dakota Fanning and Miranda July. The list is simply too long if we include all 28 filmmakers, trust me. But you can watch the previous films here: https://www.pradagroup.com/en/news-media/stories/miu-miu-womens-tales.html.
Behind the scenes of El Affaire Miu Miu
As long as I can remember covering the Venice Film Festival, I’ve watched the short films of this series, through public screenings which are part of the Giornate degli Autori sidebar, but also, more recently, on links. And this is one tradition I cannot imagine ever giving up. The joie de vivre and elegance of viewing these short masterpieces alongside representatives of the Prada Group, inspire in me a wish for renewal, and perhaps a new fall wardrobe. Granted, it may not turn out to be a Miu Miu wardrobe, but the great thing about style is that it doesn’t need to come at a high price tag. Whatever makes us feel good, unequivocally makes us look good too.
There was no shortage of great fashion in film this time around at the Venice Film Festival. From Jonathan Anderson’s spot on costumes for Luca Guadagnino’s Queer, starring Daniel Craig, to the stunningly bright coloured clothes put together by German costumer designer Bina Daigeler (TÁR, Mulan) for Pedro Almodóvar’s The Room Next Door, starring Tilda Swinton and Julianne Moore, the big screen felt like a lavish window shopping trip through luxury. The collaboration between film and fashion has seen the great fashion houses of Chanel, Dior and Saint Laurent all getting into the film business lately, but I’ll always remember that Prada was the pioneer, breaking ground with Miu Miu Women’s Tales.
The creative mandate for the series has remained the same, for the past 14 years. To create a short film about femininity using the latest Miu Miu collections. This time around, the films are directed by Chinese Malaysian filmmaker Chui Mui Tan (Tan Chui Mui) and Argentinian director and producer Laura Citarella. Tan’s previous works include the 2021 Barbarian Invasion and the 2006 title Love Conquers All. Citarella is considered an emerging voice of el Nuevo Cine Argentino — the "New Argentine Cinema movement” — and directed the 2022 title Trenque Lauquen, which starred Laura Paredes and the cast of her short for Miu Miu.
Laura Citarella and Chui Mui Tan for CULTUR.ART Miu Miu Women's Tales in Venice
In El Affaire Miu Miu, Citarella employs a similar plot line to her feature, which also world premiered at the Venice Film Festival in 2022. A model who lives a double life and whose strange habits are discovered only after she disappears, is sought by a group of women officials — including a medium. “La Caterina” as the Eastern European beauty is known, leaves hand written notes hidden in purses, a kind of treasure trove for the police which leads them on a journey of discovery, involving a lot of great clothes, courtesy of Miu Miu and scattered around the Argentinian Pampas.
In I Am the Beauty of Your Beauty, I Am the Fear of Your Fear, Tan instead tapped into her latest passion, Brazilian jiu-jitsu, to create a film around the theme of female empowerment. The clothes are all athletic wear from the Miu Miu collection, dotted here and there with some phenomenal looking evening garments, like the gold brocade coat and sequinned dress the Boss and Shaanti, the Boss Lady wear, respectively.
During an informal public talk held inside the historic Excelsior Hotel on the Lido, Citarella told the audience how she was approached to participate in the series. “I had finished my film and was traveling around, was wondering what to do with my life which is something that happens when you finish a film,” she admitted candidly, and what inspired her was “the idea of melting what I knew into an alien world for me, the world of fashion.” Tan received her invitation “in Beijing, while I was traveling with my previous film — I said yes immediately.” What drew her to the project was both the chance to explore further the discipline of jiu-jitsu but also working with “the younger generations, who are very special and for me, are very different from my generation which is also something I wanted to know more about,” she stated.
During a Venice festival which was favoured by women characters who lived outside the norms of society, Citarella and Tan also broke ground, by making the first mystery genre film in the series and the first martial arts short for Miu Miu Women’s Tales. The challenge for both filmmakers remained how to steer clear of making a fashion film that didn’t end up being a one-note sendoff, as the talk’s moderator Penny Martin, editor-in-chief of The Gentlewomen, pointed out. For Citarella, adding humour to the tale helped in that task. “It is notoriously difficult to bring things into Argentina, so I added a joke about that in the film — and how clothes had to be brought into the country,” she admitted. For Tan it was about following through with her inspiration. “I designed a fight first before I designed the story line. I also designed action choreography and had a coach to design all the different action disciplines,” she pointed out, asking us, the audience to remember always for ourselves that “your body is not the prison of your mind, you mind is not the prison of your body.”
Laura Citarella and Chui Mui Tan for CULTUR.ART Miu Miu Women's Tales in Venice
When asked who should be tapped to direct the next two shorts, both filmmakers were at a loss for words. I immediately thoughts of Farah Nabulsi, the Palestinian/British Oscar-nominated filmmaker whose feature debut The Present opens in UK cinemas this month. But also Israeli filmmaker Amit Vaknin, whose short It's Not Time for Pop was the only film from Israel to be screened at this year’s Cannes Film Festival.
If fashion and film can go hand in hand to create inspirational stories, why not add an extra layer and allow these extraordinary female creatives to help us find the formula for world peace…
By E. Nina Rothe. Check out all of her amazing platforms! https://www.eninarothe.com/
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