Up at the Villa

Philip Haas is an American artist, screenwriter and filmmaker, perhaps best known for his 1995 film Angels and Insects. He began his career as a documentary film maker, lensing ten profiles of unusual artists through the 1980s with the theme "Magicians of the Earth." Over the years he has tended... to work closely with his wife, Belinda Haas, who shares credit as writer on several of his films. In 2000 they worked on a biographical film on the silent film star Louise Brooks. That project has yet to come to fruition. His feature film Angels and Insects, set in Victorian England, was nominated for an Academy Award, The Blood Oranges which featured Sheryl Lee, an adaptation of the W. Somerset Maugham novel, Up at the Villa, and The Situation, a political thriller released in 2006. Other feature films include the highly regarded The Music of Chance , and Up at the Villa, starring Sean Penn, Anne Bancroft and Kristin Scott Thomas. In 2008 the Sonnabend Gallery of New York featured a film installation called The Butcher's Shop, commissioned by the Kimbell Art Museum, in which Haas recreated the space depicted in Annibale Carracci’s 1582 painting of the same name.
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