“Corsage” has been crowned with the the top honor at the 2022 BFI London Film Festival. The biopic of Empress Elisabeth of Austria won the best film award from the fest’s official competition, per The Hollywood Reporter. 

From writer-director Marie Kreutzer, “Corsage” made its world premiere in Cannes’ Un Certain Regard sidebar and has since been submitted as Austria’s entry to the International Feature Film Oscar race. “Phantom Thread’s” Vicky Krieps stars.

London Film Fest’s jury described the film as “masterfully realized” and praised its “mesmerizing and original interpretation” of Empress Elisabeth’s life and Krieps’ “sublime performance of a woman out of time trapped in her own iconography and her rebellious yearning for liberation.”

“When reading the biographies, letters, diaries, and so on, of Elisabeth, I sensed that her silent rebellion is a recurrent theme in her life,” Kreutzer told us. “Everything we know or think we know about her relates to that. She was a smoker when smoking was regarded as bad behavior for a woman, did not touch any food when forced to sit at official dinners, traveled the world whenever she could flea Vienna, built her own sports equipment, and went on extensive hikes or horse rides when being sporty or fit was not modern or important for anyone. She certainly lived in a golden cage and tried to expand her position’s boundaries as far as she could,” she explained. “I was drawn to her complex character. Every painting of her looks different. She played with her role, and I am continuing that for her.”

Kreutzer’s other films include 2011’s “The Fatherless” (“Die Vaterlosen”) and 2016’s “We Used to Be Cool” (“Was Hat Uns Bloß So Ruiniert”).