At Eternity's Gate

At Eternity's Gate is a 2018 biographical drama film about the final years of painter Vincent van Gogh's life. The film dramatizes the controversial theory put forward by van Gogh biographers Steven Naifeh and Gregory White Smith, in which they speculate that van Gogh's death was caused by manslaughter rather than suicide. The film is directed and co-edited by Julian Schnabel, from a screenplay by Schnabel, Jean-Claude Carrière and Louise Kugelberg. It stars Willem Dafoe as van Gogh, Rupert Friend, Oscar Isaac, Mads Mikkelsen, Mathieu Amalric, Emmanuelle Seigner and Niels Arestrup. Principal photography took place in late 2017 over 38 days at various locations across France where van Gogh resided during his final years. The film held its world premiere at the 75th Venice International Film Festival on September 3, 2018. The film was theatrically released in the United States on November 16, 2018, by CBS Films, before streaming on Netflix in France on February 15, 2019. It was released theatrically and through video-on-demand in the United Kingdom on March 29, 2019, by Curzon Artificial Eye. The film received generally positive reviews from critics; Dafoe's acting was widely acclaimed, and for his performance, Dafoe was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Actor and the Golden Globe Award for Best Actor – Motion Picture Drama, among others, and won the Volpi Cup for Best Actor at the 75th Venice International Film Festival. Plot Vincent van Gogh seems to always be in artistic and emotional exhaustion. He is occasionally enraptured by his aesthetic responses to the landscapes around Arles; he renders them in oil on canvas or in a sketch pad using his own style of creating his work in a single, rapid sitting. When not in the countryside, he paints inside a yellow room in a yellow house. He begins to contemplate the fleeting nature of some subjects of still life. He also thinks about seasonal flowers and the artistic process which renders a permanent and eternal quality to the representation of flowers on canvas, which does not wilt and wither.