If you were at Art Basel Miami Beach in December 2024, you might have noticed a surprising face amidst the art lovers and buyers. It was Natalie Portman, attending the festival to research for her role in The Gallerist—a dark comedy in which she plays a desperate gallerist who attempts to sell a dead body as a piece of art.
Though already an art lover, Portman didn’t know much about the nuances of the contemporary art world—and its colorful characters—before joining The Gallerist. “It’s almost like ideas are art, which is kind of incredible. It’s almost like a marketplace for philosophy, in some way, which can obviously lead to sometimes bullshit and sometimes really incredible, revelatory stuff,” the actor says. “It has depth and can be ridiculous, which is kind of the best combination for when you want to tell a story.”
Portman stars in the film as eccentric gallerist Polina Polinski, who is trying to make a name for herself and her new Miami Beach gallery. She begrudgingly invites an art influencer (Zach Galifianakis) to see the work of an emerging artist named Stella (Da’Vine Joy Randolph)—but soon finds herself scrambling alongside her assistant (Jenna Ortega) to sell a piece of art that features a corpse.
It’s fitting for The Gallerist to have its world premiere on January 24 at the Sundance Film Festival, where real-life buyers (and influencers) are prepared to potentially throw millions of dollars at the films they deem worthy. Cathy Yan’s biting, funny, and surprising satire revels in the clash between art and commerce. “There were a lot of really interesting ideas and themes that I personally related to as an artist, as a creative, as someone that just really wanted to explore the creative process and collaboration and the inherent tension of creating art—not just for yourself, but for the world,” the director tells Vanity Fair.
Yan is deeply familiar with this subject matter. She made her feature directorial debut in 2018 with the breakout Sundance film Dead Pigs, then jumped into the world of superheroes and DC Comics to direct 2020’s Birds of Prey. The Gallerist marks Yan’s return to non-IP-based filmmaking. “It’s hard to define what inherent value is in the art world, and so much of it becomes in the eye of the beholder—and also in the stories that are told about it, in the context and the marketing,” she says. “I always found the collision of the business and the art itself to be absolutely fascinating.”