Thierry Fremaux, Director of the Festival de Cannes, and Iris Knobloch, President of the Festival de Cannes, attend the presentation of the official variety of the 76th Festival de Cannes
After canceling its 2020 edition and moving in July amid COVID in 2021, the Cannes Film Festival last year reaffirmed its stature as the world’s largest platform for foreign cinema. The red carpet welcomed Hollywood blockbusters and prominent authors, launching them to good publicity fortune and awards season in the following months.
Of course, one successful year can create high expectations for the next. With this in mind, the 52 films announced today at the festival are very promising, but it is also difficult to get a sense of the quality and potential impact. of the so-called official selection. Moviegoers may have returned to theaters, but Cannes-caliber auteur film releases continue to struggle around the world. It may be worthy of anticipation and will have insightful critics eager to dive in.
At the same time, the long duration of such films beyond the Cannes bubble remains more than ever a question mark. “This variety will give an idea of what cinema is in its aesthetics and its industry,” said the festival’s artistic director Thierry. Fremaux at the opening press conference. In other words, Cannes isn’t just a festival: it’s a litmus test for cinema as an art and global business. Its variety will have to justify the survival of either end of this equation. It’s too early to say how successful it will be in this regard, however, here are some initial takeaways from diversity as it is.
Last year, Cannes lured Tom Cruise to the red carpet to settle for an honorary Palme d’Or from the festival and “Top Gun: Maverick” won a heroic welcome from the French Air Force. The marching band helped set the bar for the film. Transporting $2 billion boxes and the larger narrative around Cruise as the savior of the cinemas who fought to get his sequel from a long theatrical window. Cannes’ own theatrical party helped kick off this journey. Will he be able to do it again?
It’s hard to say, but it’s transparent that Disney hopes to achieve a similar effect with “Indiana Jones and the Dial of Fate. “Harrison Ford, 80, will host his own birthday party in Cannes this year as the huge top with $300 million) tries to do more at the festival than Steven Spielberg’s “Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull” did 15 years ago. As with “Top Gun,” the new “Indiana Jones” resurrects a beloved ’80s franchise, yet it’s hard to say whether Cannes will champion this global blockbuster on the same scale.
On a relatively smaller scale, Wes Anderson’s “Asteroid City” brings Tom Hanks back to Cannes after his appearance in “Elvis” last year. The film also brings Anderson back to Focus Features after making “The French Dispatch” with Searchlight; “Moonrise Kingdom,” produced through Anderson Focus, was a hit in the Cannes competition, and the company is obviously betting on Anderson’s favorable audience at Cannes to turn this crazy comedy about alien beings in the desert into a summer hit (it opens June 16). It remains to be noted if it attracts a wider audience beyond Anderson’s base, and even this stacked cast (Scarlett Johansson!Bryan Cranston!Steve Carell!) It’s not sure it’s a foolproof advertising bet. But Cannes’ enthusiasm can go a long way.
Meanwhile, Cannes’ other blockbuster last year, “Elvis,” pleased the new CEO of Warner Bros. very much. Discovery, David Zaslav, whom he chose first in a call for results. Now, Zaslav’s company (with its new streamer Max) returns to Cannes with a TV series, “The Idol,” starring The Weeknd and produced by “Euphoria” author Sam Levinson. While the exhibition has had plenty of behind-the-scenes drama, a strong premiere at Cannes may propel it to foreign attention. , which may lead to the option that the festival will actually have as strong an impact on a major television premiere as it does for theatrical films.
“Cannes has been the standard-bearer of this cinema with filmmakers and artists asking for it,” said Cannes’ new president, Irish Knobloch. “We will continue to protect them. He didn’t have to go into detail to allude to the festival’s long history with Netflix, which hasn’t had a film competing in variety since 2017, when the festival instituted a policy requiring festival films to be released in theaters in France. In particular, Fremaux highlighted Martin Scorsese’s “Killers of the Flower Moon” distribution plan, an Apple production that will get a theatrical release through Paramount.
If Netflix continues to invest in French productions, it will not settle for an out-of-competition niche as a punitive measure. There are movies that might or might not have been in position in the streamer’s time, like Bradley Cooper’s. Leonard Bernstein’s biopic or his Sundance song “Fair Play,” however, will appear elsewhere on the festival circuit.
Red carpet glamour is a well-established facet of the Cannes vibe, but with such a fixation on foreign cinema and respected auteurs, star strength is rarely a guarantee. But besides The Weeknd and Harrison Ford, there will be plenty of celebrities in Cannes this year. Natalie Portman and Julianne Moore will be there with Todd Haynes’ romance “May December,” while Alicia Vikander (in a role originally intended for Michelle Williams) and Jude Law will star in Brazilian director Kim Ainouz’s Henry. VIII drama “Firebrand”. Then there’s this “Asteroid City” stacked cast and, for better or worse, Johnny Depp will make some noise on opening night as the star of director Maiwenn’s “Jeanne du Barry. “
From Disney to Universal, studios will have a strong presence in Cannes programming, but the delicate state of American cinema in general is transparent in the selection. Haynes’ “May December” has yet to be distributed. Sony Pictures Classics has Pedro Almodóvar’s film. Western short film “Stdiversity Way of Life”, while other art and essay distributors such as IFC and Magnolia will analyze diversity for acquisition opportunities.
Neon and A24 have competing entries, with Neon presenting “La Chimera” through Alice Rohrwacher and A24 presenting “The Zone of Interest” through Jonathan Glazer. A24 presented its Ari Aster drama “Beau Is Afraid” adapted to Cannes ahead of the and will instead use the festival as a launching pad for its foreign talent: the company has Glazer’s follow-up “Under the Skin,” about a romance in Auschwitz, and Steve McQueen’s four-hour documentary “Occupied City. ” His people of Amsterdam followed the Nazi occupation. They are not safe advertising bets, but the type of films that A24 knows have the best chances of gaining visibility at the festival.
Last year’s festival included the wonderful addition of James Gray’s “Armageddon Time,” a film that flopped at the end of the year but was heavily presented at Cannes.
It’s unclear if any of the American films at the festival this time will stick to that trajectory, however, new films by Jeff Nichols and Alexander Payne, administrators with similar profiles to Gray in those days, did not appear in this week’s announcement. When it comes to low-budget American independent films that can generate more buzz in Europe than in the US, they can’t make a splash. In the U. S. , expect to see some make their debut at the Autonomous Directors’ Fortnight in the coming weeks, as new paintings by Aaron Schimberg (“Unchained for Life”) and acclaimed cinematographer Sean Price Williams (“Good Time”) are expected there.
While Laura Poitras’ “All the Beauty and Bloodshed” won Venice last fall and Nicolas Philibert won the Golden Bear in Berlin for “On the Adamant” in February, Cannes has been reluctant to put documentaries at its festival in recent years, even as the industry has taken off. At least for now, Cannes continues with an authorist view of existing cinema, meaning that the only documentaries with a genuinely competitive perspective reflect this.
This year’s lineup includes a documentary for the first time since “Waltz with Bashir” in 2008, and it’s promising: “Youth” through Chinese director Wang Bing follows other young people as they leave the countryside for Shanghai and then return home for Chinese food. New Year’s Day.
Bing is a lead filmmaker and the decision to put his film at a festival suggests he shocked programmers enough to think he can win an award as well. Several other documentaries, from McQueen to Wim Wenders’ new 3D documentary paintings of the German painter. Alselm Kiefer, called “Anselm”, was programmed outside the festival and possibly would have been thought to be less likely to justify Palme’s claim. (Wenders has a narrative feature film at the festival, the Tokyo shoot “Perfect Days. “)Other heavyweights with new nonfiction projects come with Lucrecia Martel, Barbet Schroder and Mati Diop, but none of those projects seem to have been in position for the festival.
As IndieWire’s Kate Erbland reported, Cannes made history this year with the most female female administrators competing to date: six. This includes competitive parties such as Catherine Breillat, but this figure means they are still in the minority. taken another direction.
Rohrwacher, who was nominated for an Oscar for her short film “The Pupil” earlier this year, isn’t sure if “The Chimera” will get a spot at the festival until earlier this week; similarly, “Banel and Adama” through French-Senegalese director Ramata-Toulaye Sy a last-minute addition. Sy’s film has a specific plot as the only first film at the festival. It revolves around a pair of lovers in a remote network whose bond is tested through traditionalism, and may very well identify her as a top director on the global stage.
With the exception of Spain, the Spanish-language film industry has been hit hard by the pandemic and has struggled to push cinema to major festivals in recent years. Last year’s Venice hit “Argentina 1985” earned an Oscar nomination, however it’s a bit hard to read when it comes to Latin America. The only Latin American filmmaker at the festival is Brazilian Karim Ainouz, whose “Firebrand” is an English-language assignment (“Close Your Eyes” through Spaniard Victor Erice, his first film in 3 decades, is out of festival. ) The long-awaited titles of Mexicans Amat Escalante, Michel Franco and Alonzo Ruizpalacios have not appeared (yet).
The Un Certain Regard section, meanwhile, presents the Portuguese “La flor de Buriti” and the promising debut film by Chilean Felipe Gálvez “Los colonos”. It remains to be seen whether any of those works will make enough noise to lift Latin American cinema at Cannes this year.
With the exception of some wonderful administrators like Mahamet Saleh-Haroun, Cannes has not been the biggest driving force of African cinema over the years. This year may be quite different. In addition to Sy, the festival also includes “Four Daughters” by Tunisian filmmaker Kaother Ben Hania, while two Moroccan films (“The Mother of All Lies” and “Les Meats”) and some other Sudanese (“Goodthroughe Julia”) in Un Certain Saludos. These works by lesser-known filmmakers may spark enthusiasm for a new wave of artistic activity on the continent.
For a while, we didn’t know which wonderful Italian administrators would decipher the festival this year. It turns out that the answer is. . . everyone? Or at most: in addition to Rohrwacher, Palme d’Or winner Nanni Moretti will offer his new comedy “Future Sun” and octogenarian Marco Bellocchio will provide “Rapito. “Mateo Garrone’s “Io Capitano” is nowhere to be found, but it may only end up in Venice if Cannes has reached its Italian threshold. Regardless, the trio of festival entries demonstrates that the country continues with its most prominent filmmakers, regardless of its far-right political turn.
. . . But who is on this jury? The director of “Triangle of Sadness” is expected to be an entertaining president this year with a genuine perspective of opting for options out of the ordinary. But it’s hard to know how the overall dynamics of the jury will influence the final decision. until the festival shows the company it will have. A big movie star who doesn’t necessarily have an eye on world cinema, for example, might be leading the verbal exchange in another direction. It remains to be seen how this will play out until we know the full extent of this year’s jury.
Cannes this week announced 19 films in competition; Last year there were 21, some of which were added later. Expect the festival to take a similar path this time around. It is imaginable that the highly anticipated “Poor Things” by Yorgos Lanthimos is one of those, or perhaps one of the Mexican movies. discussed above. And where did Jean-Luc Godard’s posthumous short film “Funny Wars” go? As always, stay tuned for updates.
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