Every Wes Ander­son film is a major event on the cin­e­mat­ic cal­en­dar. It’s not mere­ly the film that is played in cin­e­mas and you saunter along on a Fri­day night to see it as big as pos­si­ble; a whole world emerges around it and the immer­sive lore draws you in with its irre­sistible whimsy. 

The Phoeni­cian Scheme is a film whose roots snake back to the pre­mière of The French Dis­patch in Cannes, where Ander­son men­tioned to one of his many stars, Beni­cio del Toro (at that point a Wes World debu­tant), that he had anoth­er project in the pipeline that he’d be keen to col­lab­o­rate on. Whisk on four years, one fea­ture (Aster­oid City), a hand­ful of shorts (includ­ing Oscar-win­ning The Won­der­ful Sto­ry of Hen­ry Sug­ar), and del Toro is suit­ed, boot­ed and very bruised as the most charm­ing arms deal­er in cin­e­ma his­to­ry, Zsa-zsa Korda.

Styled after the great Luis Buñuel (in both his style choic­es and his grap­pling with spir­i­tu­al moral­i­ty), Zsa-zsa is ini­tial­ly seen pilot­ing a sab­o­taged plane as it plum­mets to earth. He mirac­u­lous­ly sur­vives the crash and then decides its high time he put his lega­cy in order. Enter Sis­ter Liesl (Mia Threap­ple­ton), his estranged daugh­ter who is now a woman of the cloth and duly appalled by her father’s activ­i­ties. He explains to her his ​“scheme” and assures that upon com­ple­tion she will be shot of him and have her birthright. With Michael Cera’s Nor­we­gian insect schol­ar Bjorn along for the ride, we’re final­ly set for adventure.

The Phoeni­cian Scheme is a film obsessed with ephemera, objects and art, pos­si­bly more so than any Ander­son film before it. We have jumped on this intrigu­ing design aspect and made an issue col­lect­ing togeth­er books, film, art and music. And for this issue, in the spir­it of this over­whelm­ing­ly tac­tile, phys­i­cal film­mak­er, we have includ­ed an array of hand­made art­work of the type where you can see the human fin­ger­prints on each piece.