Claire Denis has directed a short film for Miu Miu, and no one involved has called it a campaign. Avec Kim, starring Suzanne Lindon and the musician Kim Gordon, premieres September 5th at the Venice Film Festival as the thirty-second installment of the house's Women's Tales series — commissioned twice a year, every year, since 2011, with a single stipulation: the clothes have to be Miu Miu. Everything else, including whether the film is flattering to the clothes, is left to the director.
Denis spent her own childhood trailing a French civil-servant father through Burkina Faso, Cameroon, and Senegal before she lived in France for long, and has spent a directing career returning to what those postings left her with — what a place does to the people passing through it, and what gets left behind when they go. Asked to describe her method, she has said only that filmmaking is "a journey into the impossible," which is an odd thing for a fashion house to underwrite and exactly why the underwriting is worth noting.
The previous episode, Mona Fastvold's Discipline, has already screened. Denis's follows it into the same festival slot as features actually competing for prizes — not appended to them, not run before the trailers. A fourteen-year-old habit, still unannounced as a strategy.