The Phoenician Scheme

The 1950s. Anatole Zsa-zsa Korda, a mysterious industrialist and one of the richest men in Europe, survives yet another assassination attempt—his sixth plane crash. He is in the final stages of his most ambitious endeavor: a massive infrastructure project aimed at developing a resource-rich region, which is expected to secure him five percent of its revenues for the next 150 years. Hated by rival corporations and governments alike, Korda makes a surprising decision: he names his estranged twenty-year-old daughter Liesl—currently a novice nun investigating her mother’s unsolved murder—as his successor. Together with her father and his personal tutor Bjorn, she embarks on a journey to meet with business partners and patch a rapidly growing financial hole, only to become entangled in a web of scheming tycoons, foreign terrorists, and determined hired killers.

The Phoenician Plot opens with a slap that takes your breath away. Only for a moment—just enough time for the opening credits to roll—before launching into a fast-paced, signature Anderson-style ride through the chaotic world of megalomaniac, sociopathic tycoon Zsa-zsa Korda. The allusions to our own deranged reality are too numerous to ignore, making the film deeply political at its core. With The Phoenician Plot—or perhaps The Syrian-Lebanese Plot—Anderson delivers a razor-sharp portrait of our time. That he manages to mock it all with such originality, while somehow remaining optimistic, is something we can criticize—but mostly, we envy him for it.

The Phoenician Plot—so metafilmic it brushes up against The Royal Tenenbaums, The Darjeeling Limited, The Grand Budapest Hotel, The French Dispatch, and Asteroid City—is an eccentric, gnostic, manic diorama of capitalism: a grotesque parody of the human face we try to paint onto the system, convinced it would go to heaven (to join Bill Murray) if heaven weren’t already what it built on Earth. A+.

Distribution: Karantanija cinemas

Minoriti Open Air Cinema • Organization and production Puppet theater Maribor, Minoriti cultural quarter, Society for the development of film culture • The program is supported by the Municipality of Maribor • Sponsors Radenska, Lunos, OTP banka