This Saturday the winners of the 66th BFI London Film festival were recognized. The historical drama Corsage was awarded the Best Film Award. Corsage is directed by Austrian Filmmaker Marie Kreutzer and premiered at the Cannes Film Festival in the Un Certain Regard Section this May.

The feature is about Empress Elisabeth of Austria, commonly referred as Empress Sissi. In the 5o’s a trilogy of features about this historic figure was released directed by Ernst Marischka. The films followed a young Empress and were catalogued as “romance.” However this new film has a completely different approach to who Sissi was. The story focuses on older Empress, being set with her 40th birthday approaching in 1877. Once praised for her beauty she is close to become an old woman. The Empress searches for purpose and liberation inside her aristocratic environment.

Even though Corsage is based on a real person, it is not a biopic necessarily. Kreutzer wrote the script freely based on the Empress but added her own ideas to the story. She recognized that she can’t remember exactly which parts are real and which are not, except for the ending.

The actress that plays Empress Elisabeth is Vicky Krieps, she is originally from Luxembourg an starred before in Paul Thomas Anderson’s The Phantom Thread (2017) and in French feature Hold me tight (2021) directed by Mathieu Amalric. Her performance as Sissi has been praised and awarded Krieps the Best Performance Price at Cannes. After that recognition and the recent Best Film Award it is expected more to come in the future for this Film.

Corsage is a co-production between Germany, Austria, France and Luxembourg. It was released in Germany and Austria in theaters already and is expected to be available in the US this December distributed by IFC Films.