Shameless raises the curtain on the 70’s Sexual Revolution with filmmaker Anna Biller’s exquisite tapestry reimagining the titillation of that era. Defying the preconceptions of so-called skin flicks, VIVA is underpinned by bold and cheeky irony, yet the dead-pan tone never passes any moral-judgement.

Barbi, played by Anna Biller, is a bored Los Angeles housewife who yearns for a life beyond suburban ennui. After a quarrel with her husband, she reinvents herself as Viva, and dives into an odyssey of sexual liberation – encountering swingers’ clubs, brothels, psychedelic hippy communes – climaxing in a spectacular drug-fuelled orgy..!

This world-1st release on Blu-ray, made with HD materials provided by the director herself, finally does justice to this exquisite tableau filled with astonishing attention to details and eye-popping production design inspired by period Playboy magazines.
Crackling with joyous parody, this striking tour-de-force becomes an art-form per se. And it’s sexy too!

ANNA BILLER’S VIVA DIRECTOR‘S STATEMENT

In the film VIVA, I am reworking old sexploitation movies from the 60’s and early 70’s, from a woman’s point of view. Vintage sexploitation films interest me because they revolve around fantasies of a woman’s power over the male, her beauty, her desirability, her sex appeal. The idea was to make a movie that seems like a sexploitation movie, and that offers up all the spectacle and lurid promise of that genre, while at the same time talking about what women really go through, their fantasies and sexual trials.

 To create a distinctive look for VIVA, I looked through a bunch of decorating books and magazines, some vintage Playboy magazines, and some late 60’s films. I would tear out magazine pages, absorb the atmosphere, daydream, and then write scenes based on what I imagined was going on in the different ads and cartoons, or design sets based on the weird rooms or movie scenes I saw.  It’s a very psychedelic and colorful film, but that’s the way the 70’s looked, even in suburbia. All that acid green and yellow, all that orange, brown, blue, purple, and red.

 The most difficult thing about doing this film was directing while acting half-dressed and…IN THE NUDE! I was copying the sexploitation genre, so I felt I had to do the nudity, especially since my co-star opted out of it. I’ve always been terrified of nudity, so it was good therapy to get over the trauma and just do it.  My shyness comes through in the film, making me seem  like a victim, although I am in control as the director. So there’s this weird split. It’s very far-out.

Anna Biller
Writer & Director, VIVA.

The post Viva Blu-Ray appeared first on Shameless Films.

The post Viva appeared first on Shameless Films.