Claire Denis Directs Miu Miu's Latest Women's Tales Short, Premiering at Venice
Miu Miu has tapped French filmmaker Claire Denis to direct the 32nd installment of its Miu Miu Women's Tales short film series. The film, titled "Avec Kim," will premiere on 5 September during the 83rd Venice International Film Festival, according to the festival's official programme (La Biennale di Venezia).
The 12-minute French production is scheduled to screen at 16:30 in the Giornate degli Autori section — Venice Days, a sidebar of the festival that focuses on independent and auteur cinema. It follows the previous Women's Tales episode, "Discipline," directed by Mona Fastvold and first presented in New York in February (WWD).
Denis, born in Paris in 1946, spent much of her childhood in colonial French Africa — an experience that shaped her debut feature, "Chocolat" (1988), which was nominated for the Palme d'Or at Cannes. Her body of work includes "Beau Travail" (1999), "35 Shots of Rum" (2008), "High Life" (2018), "Both Sides of the Blade" (2022) and "Stars at Noon" (2022), the latter winning the Grand Prix at Cannes. Her most recent feature, "The Fence," was released last year (WWD).
In a statement accompanying the announcement, Denis said: "Making films for me is to get rid of explanation. It is a journey into the impossible" (WWD).
Miu Miu, the Milan-based label founded by Miuccia Prada under the Prada Group, launched the Women's Tales series in 2011 as a programme of short films by female directors. In 2023, the brand established the Miu Miu Women's Tales Committee to oversee the project, a group whose members include Prada herself, Verde Visconti (the Prada Group's talent relations special projects director), filmmaker Ava DuVernay, production designer Catherine Martin and actor-director Maggie Gyllenhaal (WWD).
The series has become a regular fixture at Venice. Miu Miu has hosted panel conversations during the festival's Giornate degli Autori as part of the Women's Tales programme (Miu Miu on Facebook), and last October Denis attended the brand's "Tales & Tellers" exhibition in Paris, which showcased more than 20 short films from the series (Variety).
For Denis, the commission places a filmmaker known for her atmospheric, often oblique storytelling inside a format built on brevity — 12 minutes, rather than the two hours a feature allows. The result screens on the Lido alongside some of the most closely watched premieres of the autumn festival calendar.
