Release
When asked about Inland Empire, Lynch responded that it is "about a woman in trouble, and it's a mystery, and that's all I want to say about it." When presenting screenings of the digital work, Lynch sometimes offers a clue in the form of a quotation from the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad: "We are like the spider. We weave our life and then move along in it. We are like the dreamer who dreams and then lives in the dream. This is true for the entire universe."
he structure of Inland Empire differs from prior Lynch films, Lost Highway or Mulholland Drive. It is neither a Möbius strip that endlessly circles around itself, nor is it divisible into sections of fantasy and reality. Its structure is more akin to a web where individual moments hyperlink to each other and other Lynch films -- hence the musical number that closes the film which contains obvious allusions to everything from Blue Velvet to Twin Peaks.
- Zoran Samardzija, 2010
Richard Peña, a New York Film Festival official and one of the first people to see Inland Empire, has summarized the film as "a plotless collection of snippets that explore themes Lynch has been working on for years," including "a Hollywood story about a young actress who gets a part in a film that might be cursed; a story about the smuggling of women from Eastern Europe; and an abstract story about a family of people with rabbit heads sitting around in a living room" -- Lynch's web-only video series, Rabbits. Peña's perception of a plot involving "the smuggling of women from Eastern Europe" stems from a scene in which one man asks another, in Polish, if he is selling the woman in the room.
The scholar Delorme indicated that the film is about adultery, but in a way that Lynch "avoid a chronological unfolding of the scenes and situations provoked by the adultery", but rather "superimpose them instead in as many scenarios developing from the potentials of the adultery", so that "he narrative is constructed on strange characters brought together by a similar terror."
The film debuted on several film festivals around the world, most notably the Venice Film Festival in Italy, New York Film Festival inNew York, United States, the Thessaloniki Film Festival in Greece, Camerimage Film Festival in Poland, Fajr International Film Festival in Iran, International Film Festival Rotterdam in the Netherlands, San Francisco Independent Film Festival in San Francisco, United States, Festival Internacional de Cine Contemporáneo de la Ciudad de México in México City, Mexico, Cinema Digital Seoul in South Korea and !f Istanbul International Independent Film Festival in Turkey. It was released in Iceland in 2007. The company that showed "Inland Empire" is called Grænaljósið or "The Greenlight".
Inland Empire was released and distributed by Ryko to the United States on 14 August 2007. It was released on 20 August in the United Kingdom, 4 October in Belgium and the Netherlands, with distribution by A-Film and 6 August 2008 in Australia, with distribution by Madman Entertainment.
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