Quijote Films, the producer of Chile’s entry to the upcoming Oscars “The Mysterious Gaze of the Flamingo,” has boarded “Mariana x BHP,” a Brazilian documentary directed and produced by Renan Flumian of Droma Productions.
Developed over six years and filmed across 17 cities on three continents, the documentary delves into the largest environmental lawsuit in history, following the devastating collapse of the Mariana dam in Brazil. Featuring over 200 hours of footage, the project won a cash prize at the Lau Haizetara Forum in San Sebastián and was presented this week to buyers and platforms at Madrid’s 5th Iberseries & Platino Industria.
Quijote Films is also a co-producer on 2025 Berlinale Silver Bear winner “The Blue Trail,” which has already surpassed 150,000 admissions in Brazilian cinemas, and the upcoming “A Colmeia,” filmed earlier this year in the Atacama Desert with Brazilian producer Sara Silveira.
“Collaborating with Brazil has been an incredible experience,” said Quijote Films’ Giancarlo Nasi who said his connection to Brazil goes back many years when he studied there and, for over a decade, served as a mentor at BrLab. “I’ve seen up close the strength and resilience of their film industry. Working hand-in-hand with Brazilian partners continues to affirm why Brazil is such a valuable ally for Quijote,” he said.
“With ‘Mariana x BHP,’ we continue to strengthen our international co-production strategy, developing content across the Americas and beyond. Next year, we’ll be in production on projects with partners in Canada, Argentina, Mexico and the U.S. Creating global content with international talent is part of our DNA—just like the commitment to excellence and craft we’ve inherited from auteur cinema,” he pointed out.
“This week at Iberseries, as we presented it to platforms, we felt we had a film with a strong identity – socially and politically resonant, yet with the potential to reach a wide audience. We’re shaping it with the tone of a legal thriller: compelling, critical of the system, conversation-starting, but also deeply engaging,” said Quijote Films producer Sergio Karmy, who extended his gratitude to the Quijote team led by their department head Eugenia Campos, who “together with Giancarlo, is behind the entire creative universe – the pitches, the decks, all the incredible materials we use every day.”
“As a Brazilian director, I’ve witnessed firsthand the stories of the victims in Brazil and the lawyers who formed an unprecedented alliance to take on the world’s largest mining company,” said Flumian who had been closely following the unprecedented class action in London for six years.
He added: “This documentary follows their fight for justice and the broader potential of the case to reshape how multinational corporations are held accountable—not just in Latin America, but across the Global South. Starting from a local tragedy, the film reveals how global power actually operates, through a narrative that is gripping, emotional and resonates with audiences around the world.”
Flumian’s previous credits include “The Hardest Conversation to Have With Your Parents” (NYT Op-Docs, 2024), which was lauded internationally for its raw portrayal of intergenerational conversations about intimacy; the documentary series “Acende a Luz “(Globoplay, 2023), which explores sexuality in later life and the upcoming action-comedy “Velhos Bandidos,“ starring the legendary Fernanda Montenegro, nominated for an Academy Award for her perf in Walter Salles’ “Central Station” and a star of “I’m Still Here.”
Chloé Zhao’s Hamnet picked up the top People’s Choice honor Sunday at the Toronto Film Festival during a 50th edition that followed Venice, Telluride and Cannes.
The Nomadland director’s adaptation of Maggie O’Farrell’s novel, a fictionalized account of Shakespeare and his wife as they fall in love, stars Paul Mescal as the Bard. The Amblin Entertainment-produced drama bowed in Telluride, where it garnered critical praise, especially for leading lady Jessie Buckley, and had a Canadian premiere in Toronto. Nomadland also earned the People’s Choice award in Toronto in 2020.
Zhao accepted the top audience prize at Toronto via a video link, and expressed gratitude and stressed the importance of making an audience connection with her work. “I’d like to share that I was very lonely when I was young. And I wrote stories and I drew manga, and I put them on the Internet so that I could read the comments and the reactions of strangers. Whether they liked them or not, I felt connected to them, and suddenly the world is a little less of a lonely place and life seems to have more meaning,” the director recalled in her acceptance speech.
Angie Han, a film critic for The Hollywood Reporter, in her Telluride review of the Shakespeare-inspired drama wrote: “In Hamnet, the latest film from Oscar-winning Nomadlanddirector Chloé Zhao, the two always go hand in hand: joy and fear, love and loss. One feeds into the other in a cycle as old as life itself, and unavoidable. But just as her William Shakespeare (Paul Mescal) turns the pain of being caught between the two into the masterpiece that is Hamlet, Zhao harnesses those elements into something gorgeous and cathartic.”
The first runner-up for the top audience prize was Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein, an adaptation of the classic Mary Shelley novel that was shot mostly in and around Toronto, while the second runner-up was Rian Johnson’s Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery, which had a world premiere at TIFF.
The win for Hamnet came as Hollywood’s awards season kicks into gear. In 2024, Mike Flanagan’s The Life of Chuck nabbed the top People’s Choice honor, with Jacques Audiard’s Emilia Pérez and Sean Baker’s Anora in runner-up positions.
The audience award for best Midnight Madness title at TIFF went to Matt Johnson’s Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie. The first runner-up is Obsession, directed by Curry Barker, and the second runner-up is The Furious, from director Kenji Tanigaki.
Elsewhere, the People’s Choice award for best international film went to director Park Chan-wook’s No Other Choice, with Joachim Trier’s Sentimental Value, the Grand Prix winner in Cannes that stars Stellan Skarsgård and Renate Reinsve, as the first runner-up, followed by Neeraj Ghaywan’s Homebound as the second runner up.
And the People’s Choice award for best documentary went to Barry Avrich’s The Road Between Us, the Oct. 7, 2023-themed film that ignited controversy at TIFF when it was invited and then disinvited and finally reinstated by TIFF programmers. The first runner-up in the category is EPIC: Elvis Presley in Concert by Baz Luhrmann, and the second runner-up is You Had to Be There: How the Toronto Godspell Ignited the Comedy Revolution, from director Nick Davis.
The People’s Choice awards are voted on by TIFF attendees, and in all 14 audience and juried awards were handed out on Sunday morning in Toronto. To prevent festgoers voting more than once for the same film, TIFF matches email addresses to ticket-buyer information, and verifies vote origin against IP addresses.
While not voting for the same film more than once, TIFF patrons can vote for as many different films as they want, but have to have bought a ticket to an individual film they vote.
As in recent years, TIFF’s 2025 edition was overshadowed by Venice and Cannes, as Toronto hosted no official press conferences to help market films ahead of the awards season, and Toronto has no official film competition. As Hollywood contracts, celebrities made red carpet appearances in Toronto and took selfies with fans, but without the glitz and glamour as on the Croisette and the Lido.
In juried prize-giving, To The Victory!, director Valentyn Vasyanovych’s dark comedy about Ukraine’s post-war future and who also plays the main character, won the Platform prize.
The FIPRESCI prize went to Spanish filmmaker Lucía Aleñar Iglesias’ Forastera, a directorial debut that stars Zoe Stein and Martina García, and the NETPAC award for the best Asian film by a first- or second-time feature director at TIFF went to Jitank Singh Gurjar for his second feature In Search of the Sky.
The Canadian Discovery Award for emerging filmmakers went to Sophy Romvari’s Locarno prize winner Blue Heron, about eight-year-old Sasha and her Hungarian immigrant family relocating to a new home on Vancouver Island.
“This is very relevant to the society that we live in, and the world we live in, and to acknowledge the ongoing genocide in Palestine,” Romvari told a Lightbox audience when accepting her award on Sunday.
And the best Canadian feature film prize picked by a TIFF jury went to Zacharias Kunuk’s Inuk historical drama Uiksaringitara (Wrong Husband) after a North American premiere in Toronto.
The Short Cuts award for best international short film went to Joecar Hanna’s Talk Me, executive produced by Spike Lee and which bowed in Cannes, while the best animated short was picked up by French director Agnes Patron for To The Woods, which had a North American premiere at TIFF.
Patron dedicated her winning short to “all the children in this world who see the sky darkening above their heads, filling their eyes and hearts with rage and fear instead of love and poetry.”
And the best Canadian short film went toThe Girl Who Cried Pearls, a stop motion animated film from Oscar-nominated Canadian filmmakers Chris Lavis and Maciek Szczerbowski, with backing from the National Film Board of Canada, while the Vimeo Staff-Pick trophy went to Afghan filmmaker Salar Pashtoonyar’s I Fear Blue Skies.
On the film sales front, no major deals were unveiled in Toronto during the past 10 days as Toronto continues to be mostly a launchpad for movies, often feel-good and escapist fare destined for streaming platforms, and already with U.S. distribution.
The muted informal sales market comes ahead of Toronto being set to launch an official content market, named The Market, in 2026.
The 2025 Toronto Film Festival is in full swing, and while the red carpets and premieres dominate the headlines, the talk at the halfway point has shifted to next year and TIFF’s plans to launch its first official content market.
For decades, Toronto has thrived with a bustling but informal market, primarily for finished films (unlike L.A’s American Film Market in November, where the biggest deals are for film packages seeking financing). But TIFF has never had an official marketplace, where buyers and sellers could set up shop to peddle movies under one roof.
That will change in 2026 with the launch of TIFF: The Market, a seven-day event scheduled for Sept. 10-16. Bankrolled by a $16 million (CAD $23 million) investment from the Canadian government, the new initiative aims to make TIFF a hub for all things content, not just a film market but also a one-stop shop for television, gaming and immersive formats, a co-production forum and a works-in-progress showcase.
Among industry veterans, TIFF’s market plans have sparked equal parts curiosity and skepticism. The biggest concern is timing. TIFF falls just three months after Cannes, too early for many projects to be fully packaged, and weeks before AFM, traditionally the fall market for putting deals together.
“It will be much harder to get packages together over the summer after Cannes,” says Mongrel Media co-president Andrew Frank. “Even at AFM, you see how packages only come together at the last moment, and Toronto is even earlier.”
Frank also questions the economics. “With costs going up, will people come to two markets — Toronto and AFM? They have to figure out what their delta is, what makes Toronto a unique proposition. I don’t know what that is yet.”
Notes Cornerstone Films co-founder Mark Gooder: “They have a big pot of money to spend. It depends on how they spend it. Will the money be used to support sellers as well as buyers to come here?”
Not that AFM is in great shape. After last year’s poorly received stint in Las Vegas, the market will return to Los Angeles this November at a new, untested venue — the Fairmont Century Plaza in Century City. Adding to the uncertainty, Jean Prewitt, head of the Independent Film & Television Alliance, which runs the American Film Market, will step down at year’s end.
AFM’s current weakness could provide an opening for TIFF, particularly for Europeans who don’t want, or can’t afford, to make two costly trips to North America.
“AFM is not a market we attend, so [after Cannes] our next one is Berlin [in February],” explains Samuel Blanc of French sales group The Party Film Sales. “It would be really useful to have a fall market for art house films, because the AFM doesn’t fill that role. If they do it right, it could re-dynamize that time of the year.”
TIFF has been careful to stress that the new initiative will not simply replicate other markets. “It is a content market, not a film market,” notes TIFF’s chief programming officer Anita Lee. In addition to film, the new TIFF market will include television and gaming as well as XR and immersive content. But those ambitions raise other questions about the industry calendar. Gamescom, the world’s largest gaming expo, takes place in Cologne just two weeks earlier. MIPCOM, the top TV market, comes to Cannes a month later. TIFF could risk diluting its impact by trying to be all things to all people.
But at a time of general industry disruption — “the business model for independent film is gone and we haven’t found a new one yet,” says Gooder — most industry players are willing to give TIFF a chance. Many see Toronto as a natural bridge between the U.S. and international industries and a logical hub for international financing and co-production.
“With changing production financing and distribution models, a Toronto-based marketplace builds on TIFF’s international prestige and represents a logical next step,” says Jim Sternberg, a partner at Make Good, a Toronto-based consultancy for film financing and business affairs.
“We’re seeing more and more producers look to co-production to navigate the complex financial landscape,” adds Charles Auty, chief commercial officer at debt financing group Elevate Production Finance. “Establishing those producer relationships early can be a useful aid to support the proper development of projects.”
Then there is the Trump factor.
“A lot of buyers, particularly from Europe, are concerned about traveling to the U.S. right now, given the current political climate,” notes Gooder. “They’d be much happier with a trip to Toronto than with dealing with Homeland Security.”
Nearly 10 years ago, George Miller brought the Mad Max franchise blasting back to relevance with Fury Road. The film wasn’t just well-liked, it was basically a game changer for plenty of moviegoers and delivered them something they’d never really seen at the time. And of the many things to love about Fury Road, people fell greatly in love with Charlize Theron’s Imperator Furiosa, who is more of the film’s true protagonist than Tom Hardy’s Max.
Spoilers of the Week: August 12th
When Miller revealed he was following up Fury Road with a prequel focused on Furiosa, eyebrows were definitely raised, particularly when Anya Taylor-Joy was cast as a young version of the character. Then we got to see Furiosa’s first trailer, and it instantly became clear Miller was about to cook yet again. Now that it’s out, people have gotten to experience what’s been said in the weeks since its premiere at Cannes: Furiosa: A Mad Max Sagais the real deal, and a more than welcome return to mad, mad car-heavy wasteland.
While not quite the revelation that Fury Road was, or at least not in the same way, critics and audiences have been fairly high on Furiosa. Amid criticisms of the pacing and visuals, those who like it really like it, particularly its cast and 15-year scope that makes it feel like the post-apocalyptic epic it’s been marketed as. With the summer movie season in full swing, this film will probably end up as the highlight for many once all is said and done.
If you saw Furiosa, let us know what you thought about it. Did it live up to whatever expectations you had, and wht do you want out of Miller and Mad Max next? Tell us in the comments below.
Selena Gomez shared her sweet reaction to learning she won the Best Actress Award at Cannes Film Festival.
“I’m so excited!” she said into her phone on Saturday, May 25. Gomez, 31, received a call from Zoe Saldaña, who informed her that the women of Emilia Pérez were all awarded the Best Actress honor together. Gomez and Saldaña, 45, share the award with Karla Sofia Gascón and Adriana Paz.
The “Single Soon” singer learned the news while in New York City. She was in Central Park having a picnic with pals when she got the call. Gascón was still in France to accept the honor at the closing ceremony, where Emilia Pérez also won the coveted Jury Prize.
“Thank you SO much [Cannes Film Festival] and the whole board,” Gomez wrote via Instagram Story on Saturday.
The stars are out and shining bright like diamonds at the 77th annual Cannes Film Festival in France. The big event, which has been dubbed the most prestigious film gathering, kicked off on Tuesday, May 14, and is slated to run until Saturday, May 25. The festival previews new films in all genres from all […]
Barbie director Greta Gerwig served as the Cannes 2024 jury president and explained that the voters couldn’t single out one star from Emilia Pérez, a musical about a drug lord (Gascón) who seeks out a lawyer (Saldaña) to help get gender confirmation surgery.
“It was such a film that felt like it belonged to … this interplay between these sisters — who are so different, but they are playing with each other the whole time,” Gerwig said when asked about giving Best Actress to all four women. “It almost felt like everyone was shining and they were all a unit. To separate them felt like it undermined the magic of what they created together.”
Gerwig added that the Cannes jury “really wanted to honor” how they worked to gather as a group. “I think that each of them is a standout, but together they’re transcendent.”
Actress Lily Gladstone, who also served as a jury member, echoed the idea when they presented the award. “We decided that how can you award a harmony by singling out individual notes? They’re stronger when they resound together, so we decided this year to award Best Actresses,” the Flowers of the Killer Moon said said during the closing ceremony.
Emilia Pérez, directed by Jacques Audiard, premiered at the French film festival one week prior, and it received a nine-minute standing ovation that left Gomez and her costars in tears.
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“Thank you Cannes!” the Only Murders in the Building star wrote via Instagram on May 18. “I’m so honored to be a small part of something so special in Emilia Pérez — Jacques, thank you from the bottom of my heart for believing in me. @zoesaldana @karsiagascon @edgarramirez25 and every single person apart of this film absolutely blew me away. Love you guys 🤍.”
The musical also gave Gomez the opportunity to act in Spanish, which was a big change for her. “I’m going to diminish myself a little bit here. This has nothing to do with the film, I am honored to be a part of it. I’m not as happy with what I feel like I could’ve done in Spanish,” she admitted to AP in an interview published on May 22. “But overall, I hope that it doesn’t hinder my performance and I’m really grateful for the opportunity. Perhaps I could’ve had more time with it, but I was full-throttle and I wanted to be a part of this so badly. It was a challenge for me, for sure.”
Saldaña, whose first language is Spanish, gushed over her costar’s efforts. “She worked so hard,” Saldaña said of Gomez. “You did such a marvelous job, and she knew her lines. And the language never got in between the emotion that she was sharing as Jessie so we were all so impressed.”
The newly released Furiosahas the world blazing with Mad Max fever. Some are celebrating the occasion by rewatching 2015’s Fury Road, if not all four movies. Others are thinking about what could’ve been, particularly as it pertains to the 2015 Mad Max game from Just Cause creator Avalanche Studios.
Spoilers of the Week: August 12th
During a recent interview with Gaming Bible at Cannes, franchise director George Miller talked about the game, which he isn’t too hot on. He was candid in calling it “not as good as I wanted it to be.” To him, it failed because the team had to “give all our material” to Avalanche instead of being involved directly, and “I’m one of those people that i’d rather not do something unless you can do it at the highest level, or at least try to make it at the highest level.”
If he had his way, another Mad Max game would happen, but one with Hideo Kojima at the helm. The Metal Gear Solid and Death Stranding creator has openly been a fan of Fury Road since it came out, and Miller called him the perfect guy to take on that endeavor. “I’ve just been speaking to him,” the director added. “[But] he’s got so much fantastic stuff in his own head that I would never ask him.” (Kojima, for what it’s worth, saw Furiosa at Cannes and called it a “masterpiece.”)
Avalanche’s Mad Max game launched months after the release of Fury Road, and is in fact set in between that and Beyond Thunderdome. The game got solid reviews when it launched, but the big thing that did it in was releasing on September 1, 2015… aka, the same day as Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain. When two fairly big games go up against one another on the same day, there’s typically a loser, and in this case, it was ol’ Max Rockatansky.
Here’s where things get a little murky, though: putting Mad Max out on that date was apparently out of Avalanche’s hands. Christofer Sundberg, who co-founded the studio in 2003, revealed on X that Warner Bros. wouldn’t budge when he suggested the game shift from its September 1 release. As a result, “they blamed us for the bad sales and cancelled a bunch of awesome DLC that was just sitting there waiting to be released.” To this day, he admits that he doesn’t know why WB was so adamant about it.
Sundberg also took Miller’s thoughts on his game to task, alleging that WB tried to force Mad Max into a linear game when Avalanche’s bread and butter is big, open-world titles. A year into development, the studio was told to convert it into a non-linear game, and he chalked up Miller’s comments to “complete nonsense and [it] just shows complete arrogance. […] Mad Max was a hell of a great game, the potential was missed due to political nonsense.” And if Kojima did try a stab at making a Max game, he thinks it’d be a “completely different experience.”
In the years since its release, Mad Max has been looked back on fondly and achieved a bit of cult classic status. To date, it’s playable on both PC and consoles via backwards compatibility. Maybe with the franchise being the hot topic of the weekend, the game will see a little more love over the next few days.
With 22 films in the running this year, the juried competition 2024’s Cannes Film Festival arguably offers an early taste of this year’s Oscar contenders, as well as a peek at how industry insiders from around the globe view the work of their peers.
This year also marks the first time an American female director has led the competition’s jury: Barbie director Greta Gerwig is its president, so there’s an argument to be made that the winners of the juried competition, which were announced at an evening ceremony on Saturday, May 25, reflect where the influential artist sees the wind blowing.
As the jury emerged from its villa on Saturday, led by Gerwig, a red carpet commentator mused about the sometimes contentious deliberations of the voting body. “Sometimes they argue for hours,” one said. But this time, the 11-day festival’s closing ceremony started relatively on schedule, and announced the winners of the coveted awards.
In perhaps the nights biggest surprise, the best actress award was split between the four stars of Jacques Audiard‘s Emilia Perez,Adriana Paz, Zoe Saldaña, Karla Sofía Gascón, and Selena Gomez. In other unexpected news, The Seed Of The Sacred Fig, was singled out for a special jury prize for best screenplay, a likely nod to Iranian writer/director Mohammad Rasoulof’s escape from arrest in his home country after years spent criticizing its government. The night’s biggest prize, the Palme d’Or, went to the fest’s most buzzed about film: Anora, a New-York set movie from Sean Bakerabout a Brooklyn sex worker (Mikey Madison) who enters into a relationship with a client.
Here’s the full list of the winners of the 77th Cannes Film Festival:
Honorary Palme d’Or
George Lucas
Camera d’Or (Best First Film)
WINNER:Armand (Directed by Halfdan Ullmann Tøndel)
Special mention: Mongrel (Directed by Wei Liang Chiang and You Qiao Yin)
One kind of artistic bravery involves, say, an actor bearing it all, self-consciousness be damned. And then there is the sort of courage on display—in front of and behind the camera—in The Seed of the Sacred Fig, a slow-burn drama set in turbulent, repressive modern-day Iran that premiered here at the Cannes Film Festival on May 24. The film’s director, Mohammad Rasoulof, has fled Iran after receiving an eight-year prison sentence for his movies, and the film’s actors have been investigated by the state. These artists knew such an outcome was likely—an inevitable consequence of publicly criticizing the Iranian government—yet they made the film anyway, so committed are they to the urgency of their message.
Sacred Fig is about a family in Tehran, comfortably middle-class but poised to ascend to a new economic stratum. The father, Iman (Missagh Zagreb), works for the country’s judicial system and has been promoted to investigating judge. The position comes with a certain amount of perks and social cachet but also involves the signing of death warrants following hasty, perfunctory investigations. His doting wife, Najmeh (the remarkable Soheila Golestani), is excited that the family will get to move into a three-bedroom apartment so that her adolescent daughters, Rezvan (Mahsa Rostami) and Sana (Setareh Maleki), won’t have to share a bedroom. Iman is stressed about work, haunted by the mortal weight of his decisions, but otherwise the household seems content enough, a picture of stability.
Yet the noises coming from outside suggest a coming storm. Protestors have taken to the streets following the death of Mahsa Amini, a 22-year-old Kurdish woman who died in 2022 under suspicious circumstances while in police custody, after she was arrested for allegedly improperly wearing a hijab. The subsequent demonstrations were massive, and resulted in the deaths of hundreds of people and the arrests of thousands more. As Iman’s workload grows heavier with each wave of protestor roundups, requiring him to issue countless dire rulings per day, his daughters begin to rebel against the strictures of their home and their country.
Rasoulof unspools this narrative at a deliberate pace, introducing plot elements that initially appear small but gradually spread like cracks on a windshield. When a handgun is first glimpsed—given to Iman for his protection—we’re fairly certain it will have some grim function later on. Same for the classmate whom Rezvan brings home one day, a small-town girl who has moved to Tehran to study and has found herself, either willingly or not, amidst the swell of the uprising. There is some suspense here, but Rasoulof mostly keeps the first half of the film focused on social manners, all the careful negotiation required when living under the glaring eye of a totalitarianism.
He is setting the stage for the second half of Sacred Fig, in which the tenuously maintained order of the family crumbles and the allegorical engine of the film churns into motion. The Seed of the Sacred Fig is about everyday Iranians, particularly women, coming to realize that a monster—or, at least, a functionary of a monstrous entity—is in the house with them. With calm insistence, Rasoulof depicts the shaking awake of perhaps whole swaths of Iranians who have found themselves no longer able to abide or ignore the injustices occurring on their doorsteps—nor those in their communities, or families, who help perpetuate that injustice.
This is a sad and frightening story about a family’s undoing, but Rasoulof ekes out some hope too. He threads in real footage of recent protests throughout the film, most shot in the narrow vertical aspect ratio of cellphone video—perhaps modernity’s most effective tool for documenting state brutality. Many of these clips are horrors: beatings, shootings, young people lying dead in the streets. They are visceral reminders of the fiction of Sacred Fig—a narrative film can only reveal so much, can only make us imagine what Rasoulof then shows us in plain fact.
But the footage is not all crushing. At a crucial moment in the film, Rasoulof cuts to rousing images of women in protest, both solitary and en masse. It’s a poignant act of humility, I think—a solemn acknowledgment that Rasoulof’s allegory has its own purpose, but perhaps best functions as a signal boost for those so bravely clamoring on the front lines of reality. The Seed of the Sacred Fig is a mighty tribute to the filmmaker’s many countrywomen who continue to risk it all in the fight for their lives.
The stars are out and shining bright like diamonds at the 77th annual Cannes Film Festival in France.
The big event, which has been dubbed the most prestigious film gathering, kicked off on Tuesday, May 14, and is slated to run until Saturday, May 25. The festival previews new films in all genres from all around the world.
At the official opening ceremony on Tuesday, which also served as a screening for Le Deuxième Acte (The Second Act), stars including Greta Gerwig, Jane Fonda and Meryl Streep brought their fashion A-game.
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Gerwig, 40, sparkled in a plum-colored sequin gown by Saint Laurent, which she paired with jewelry from Chopard. Fonda, 86, for her part, wore a beaded jumpsuit by Elie Saab, and Streep, 74 looked timeless in an ivory wrap gown.
Keep scrolling to see more looks from the 2024 Cannes Film Festival:
The story behind the making of Palestinian-Danish director Mahdi Fleifel’s second feature, To a Land Unknown, is probably as intriguing as the film itself. Shot on the fly in Greece, with production beginning exactly a month after the Hamas attacks of October 7th, the movie was somehow completed in time to premiere at Cannes just over six months later.
That may be something of a record in terms of delivering a feature, but it also speaks to the precarious and volatile situation the film is depicting: that of Palestinian refugees stuck in Athens en route to someplace else, caught in a purgatory between a home they can’t return to and a new one they don’t know.
To a Land Unknown
The Bottom Line
A sober and sincere refugee story.
Venue: Cannes Film Festival (Directors’ Fortnight) Cast: Mahmood Bakri, Aram Sabbah, Angeliki Papoulia, Mohammad Alsurafa Director: Mahdi Fleifel Screenwriters: Fyzal Boulifa, Mahdi Fleifel, Jason McColgan
1 hour 45 minutes
For best friends Chatila (Mahmood Bakri) and Reda (Aram Sabbah), the heroes of Fleifel’s melancholic, shaggy-dog street movie, that purgatory has been going on for some time. When we first see the two 20somethings, they’re hanging out in a park seemingly doing nothing, until we realize they’re about to steal a woman’s purse. They have few resources and no possibilities of employment, so their only goal is to rob enough to purchase fake passports and move to Germany, where life could be better.
Holed up in a graffiti-filled squat occupied by other migrants, they lounge around in the day and kill time however they can, whether it’s skateboarding through the city or, in Reda’s case, shooting up heroin. Fleifel’s depiction of their world is both authentic and bleak: These are young men with passions and dreams like the rest of us — Chatila also has a wife and son stuck in a Lebanese refugee camp — but they’ve been rendered immobile by the situation in Palestine (though not specifically Gaza, which is never alluded to in the film) and all the strict European immigration policies working against them.
There’s a Midnight Cowboy-aspect to the story of two down-and-out dudes trying to make it out of the city toward someplace better, and the fact that Reda turns tricks in the park in order to pay for his drug habit is something straight out of 1970s New York. Likewise, the grainy 16mm photography of Thodoris Mihopoulos feels like a throwback to another era, when movies were made off-the-cuff with just a few actors and locations.
Fleifel channels that vibrant urban energy throughout much of the film, though there are some longueurs in the second half that a tighter edit could fix. A plot eventually kicks in when the two friends cross paths with a 13-year-old Palestinian kid, Malik (Mohammad Alsurafa), who’s trying to join an aunt in Italy. In what can only be described as an act of pure humanity, Chatila and Reda decide to help him out, even if it means postponing their own pipe dreams of getting to Germany and opening a café.
At that point, To a Land Unknown takes a decidedly darker turn, with Chatila enlisting a Greek woman (Angeliki Papoulia) to escort Malik on his flight, although she’s an alcoholic and not to be trusted. While the friends wait to see if their plan worked, they come up with another scheme to pose as smugglers and steal money from a trio of Syrian refugees. It’s truly a dog-eat-dog world where men with good intentions resort to crime, violence and even torture when there’s no other solution. Fleifel never shies away from the lasting damages that exile can cause, whether one makes it out or not.
Much of the film is set around the squats and streets of backwater Athens, and we never once visit any famous ruins or tourist sites of the Greek capital. At some point Chatila asks Malik if he’s ever seen the Acropolis, to which the boy responds: “Yes, everyday, it’s right there,” meaning he could care less about it when his entire life hangs in the balance.
That doesn’t mean To a Land Unknown lacks culture, must memorably when someone recites a few verses by Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish that are initially mistaken for rap lyrics. It’s a telling moment, especially as it describes the very situation that Chatila, Reda and so many others find themselves in as conflicts engulf the Middle East and other parts of the world. For all the running, skating and scheming the two friends do throughout the city, they seem condemned to remain where they are.
When New Yorker film critic Pauline Kael wrote a long and heated rave of Bernardo Bertolucci’s Last Tango in Paris after its premiere in 1972, she stated, among other things, that “this is a movie people will be arguing about for as long as there are movies.”
Kael may have been overdoing it when she stressed Last Tango‘s monumental importance, claiming it was a “movie breakthrough” and that it “altered the face of the art form.” But in terms of people arguing years later about the film’s legacy, she was spot-on.
Being Maria
The Bottom Line
Doesn’t do full justice to its compelling subject.
Venue: Cannes Film Festival (Cannes Première) Cast: Anamaria Vartolomei, Matt Dillon, Giuseppe Maggio, Céleste Brunnquell, Yvan Attal, Marie Gillain Director: Jessica Palud Screenwriters: Jessica Palud, Laurette Polmanss
1 hour 42 minutes
Case in point: Being Maria, a new biopic of tormented French actress Maria Schneider, who at age 19 starred opposite Marlon Brando in the Bertolucci movie — a feat that launched her career as a promising new international actress while destroying her life at the same time.
The reasons for this are well known, and resurfaced over the past decade alongside the many #MeToo scandals that rocked the film world: For the infamous sequence in Last Tango in which Brando’s character, Paul, anally rapes Schneider’s character, Jeanne, using butter as a lubricant, the actress was never forewarned — the scene wasn’t in the original script — nor was she ever asked for consent. Brando and Bertolucci conspired to take her by surprise, and while the sodomy was simulated, the butter was real, and the entire humiliating experience would have a life-changing effect on Schneider.
Being Maria, directed by Jessica Palud (Revenir), who adapted the script from a book by Vanessa Schneider — a journalist for Le Monde and Maria’s younger cousin — is built entirely around that pivotal incident, both for better and for worse. Like the actress herself, whose life and career exploded with Last Tango’s success while unraveling at the same time, the movie loses its way after the scandal surrounding Bertolucci’s film fizzles out.
Before then, Palud paints a convincing portrait of a young woman from a troubled background whose connection to the movies was more personal than professional. When we first meet Maria (the excellent Anamaria Vartolomei from Happening), she’s on a film set admiring the work of her estranged father, the actor Daniel Gélin (Yvan Attal), who abandoned her as a child.
The girl is already 16 and lives with her mom (Marie Gillian), a former model who raised her daughter alone and doesn’t want Maria going anywhere near her dad. When she finds out the two are getting to know each other, she explodes with rage and viciously kicks Maria out of the house, which winds up inadvertently propelling her daughter into stardom.
Through the help of Daniel, Maria starts working as an actress, playing small roles in a handful of films. Soon she’s 19-years-old and sitting in a café opposite Bertolucci (Giuseppe Maggio), who’s decided to cast her in Last Tango, studying her like a caged tiger fascinated by its prey. Bertolucci fans beware: The director comes across here as a pompous and careless prima donna.
Brando (played quite convincingly by a heavily made-up Matt Dillon) is much more charming and paternalistic, initially taking Maria under his wing to show her the ropes of his profession. In one early scene they shoot together, Maris admires how Brando manages to shed real tears on set, to which he responds: “I wasn’t acting.”
This comes back to bite Maria big time when we arrive at the rape scene and the actress is caught completely off-guard. She trusted both Brando and Bertolucci, but the two wanted her reaction to be so real that they deliberately failed to warn her. After the scene is in the can and Schneider storms off to cry in her dressing room, she’s forced to come back and shoot the second part of the sequence. Like a pro, she does it, and nobody apologizes to her. The best Brando can say is: “It’s only a film.”
Palud, who previously worked on movie shoots as an assistant — including, ironically, on Bertolucci’s 2003 explicit three-way romance, The Dreamers — recreates the Last Tango production with both authenticity and emotional aplomb. The fatherless Maria finds a surrogate dad in Brando, only to be sadistically betrayed by him, in an act that would wind up breaking her. No matter how successful Last Tango would become, Maria would only remember that scene.
The problem with the film is that that scene happens about a half hour in, after which we’re left with a downward and rather predictable spiral that fails to maintain our interest. We see Schneider losing it soon after Last Tango becomes a scandalous sensation — it received an X-rating in the U.S. and was legally banned in Italy, where all prints of the film were burned — partying all night long, dating a heroin addict and becoming one herself, nodding off on set and failing to remember her lines.
Vartolomei is a compelling actress and the camera truly loves her, but there’s only so much she can do with a script that doesn’t have much of a second or third act. Had Palud set the entire movie around the Last Tango shoot and its immediate aftermath, the drama would have perhaps been more compact. Instead, we’re left watching Maria dance in lots of nightclubs, go through withdrawal, get hospitalized, fall in love with a young film student (Céleste Brunnquell) doing a thesis on women in movies, and try to kick her habit for good. Plenty of stuff happens, but there’s no real arc to sustain the material.
This doesn’t mean Being Maria lacks value, as a film about how some major films should be reconsidered in light of our evolving standards. Not everyone loves the idea of an on-set intimacy coordinator, but Schneider certainly could have used one on Last Tango. Sure, the scene might have been less jarring in the end, but Bertolucci might not have traumatized his actress for life.
Palud’s film asks us to contemplate whether art should always truimph over real people, using Maria Schneider’s sad true story as proof that certain things aren’t worth doing to make a “movie breakthrough.”
Norwegian writer-director Halfdan Ullmann Tondel takes some big swings with his first feature Armand, not all of which connect, but the ambition and risk-taking are largely impressive.
A single-setting drama that unfolds in an echo-filled elementary school after hours, it stars Renate Reinsve (The Worst Person in the World) as local celebrity Elisabeth, the mother of never-met Armand, a first-grade boy who is accused by his classmate Jon, also never seen, of sexual abuse.
Armand
The Bottom Line
Works hard, but not quite top of the class.
Venue: Cannes Film Festival (Un Certain Regard) Cast: Renate Reinsve, Ellen Dorrit Petersen, Endre Hellestveit, Thea Lambrechts Vaulen, Oystein Roger, Vera Veijovic Director/screenwriter: Halfdan Ullmannn Tondel
1 hour 57 minutes
When the boys’ teacher and key school staffers call a meeting with parents to decide the next steps, Elisabeth clashes with Jon’s parents, Sarah (Ellen Dorrit Petersen) and Anders (Endre Hellestveit), although not all is as it seems. The basic setup recalls, among other stories about accusations, Roman Polanski’s adaptation of stage play Carnage, but Armand gets much weirder as it goes on, with choreographed dance sequences and melodramatic revelations that feel contrived and tacked on to make the film more arthouse and less issues-driven-middlebrow.
Reception in Cannes has been largely warm following its debut in the Un Certain Regard strand, and Armand has racked up some offshore sales.
Bit by bit, Ullmann Tondel’s screenplay reveals that Elisabeth and Sarah have more history than shared playdates for their kids. They’ve known each other since they were children at this very same school, and Elisabeth was married to Sarah’s brother, who is now dead, possibly from suicide after a tempestuous relationship with Elisabeth. Reinsve plays her character here as a woman trying to live as normal a life as possible and be the best mother she can be, even though she’s well aware how her fame changes the dynamic in every room she enters — though egalitarian-minded Norwegians often try to seem unimpressed.
That’s certainly the case with the boys’ classroom teacher Sunna (Thea Lambrechts Vaulen), who, although she looks young, is trying to appear as professional as possible and handle the whole situation by the book. The school’s principal, Jarle (Oystein Roger), is mostly concerned with covering his back and avoiding any escalation that would get him in trouble. School safeguarding lead Ajsa (Vera Veijovic) is there to back him up with policy advice, but when she keeps getting uncontrollable nose bleeds the constant interruptions to the meeting only serve to escalate the tension.
The atmosphere could be cut with a popsicle stick from the start already, with prissy, judgy-faced Sarah ready to call the cops at any second and keen to put all the blame on Elisabeth. But Elisabeth is not to be trifled with, and she defends her son vigorously, pointing out that it’s only one kid’s word against another and questioning whether or not what was said was misinterpreted.
Back and forth the bickering goes until Ullmann Tondel starts to throw strange shapes into the drama. In the press notes he talks about the influence of films by Luis Buñuel, especially The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie and The Exterminating Angel, and that’s felt in the increasingly surreal touches, as when Elisabeth suddenly gets an uncontrollable fit of giggles — a scene that goes on uncomfortably long. While that feels closer to Buñuel’s taste for shock moves and absurdist mystery, the sequences of Elisabeth suddenly breaking into a choreographed pas de deux with the school janitor (Patrice Demoniere) and later an almost orgiastic ensemble dance with a larger cast just seem self-indulgent and silly.
Some may find themselves straining to find artistic traces here of the work of Ullmann Tondel’s grandparents, Ingmar Bergman and Liv Ullmann, but millennial-generation Ullmann Tondel’s directing style feels more of a piece with contemporary Nordic cinema, with its flights of fancy and quirky humor, than the high style of his progenitors. His screenwriting here, however, feels like it’s lost its way when it tries to tidy everything up in the final scene, even if the staging strains to maintain a sense of mystery by drowning out the dialogue with thrashing rain.
Full credits
Venue: Cannes Film Festival (Un Certain Regard) Cast: Renate Reinsve, Ellen Dorrit Petersen, Endre Hellestveit, Thea Lambrechts Vaulen, Oystein Roger, Vera Veijovic, Assad Siddique, Patrice Demoniere Production companies: Eye Eye Pictures, Keplerfilm, One Two Films, Prolaps Produktion, Film I Vast Director/screenwriter: Halfdan Ullmannn Tondel Producers: Andrea Berentsen Ottmar Executive producers: Dyveke Bjorkly Graver, Harald Fagerheim Bugge, Renate Reinsve Co-producers: Koji Nelissen, Derk-Jan Warrink, Fred Burle, Sol Bondy, Alicia Hansen, Stina Eriksson, Kristina Borjeson, Magnus Thomassen Directors of photography: Pal Ulvik Rokseth Production designer: Mirjam Veske Costume designer: Alva Brosten Editor: Robert Krantz Sound designer: Mats Lid Stoten Music: Ella van der Woude Casting: Jannicke Stendal Hansen Sales: Charades
1 hour 57 minutes
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Filming in Hungary offers everything from a massive amount of production space and a 20-year strong tax rebate to eight symphony orchestras and thermal baths.
On a panel during the Cannes Film Festival at the Marche du Film, film commissionaire Csaba Kael, and producers Ildikó Kemeny, Robert Lantos, and Mike Goodridge spoke about the experiences of filming in Hungary.
Kael noted that commercial film production began in the country in the early 1900s. “It is built into our DNA,” said Kael of filmmaking. Only the U.K. has more film production than Hungary, he said. This year, Hungary is celebrating the 20th anniversary of its offered tax rebate program, which offers films produced in Hungary a 30 percent rebate based on their expenditure.
Lantos, who has been filming in the country since the 1990s prior to the tax credits, said, “Whenever I have a project that needs a European-looking city, my direct path is to Budapest.” He added: “I can say that of all the places in the world where I have made films where the rebate is most guaranteed to function smoothly is in Hungary.”
According to NFI, the total spending on production hit a record high in 2023 in Hungary, reaching $910 million, almost 4 times more than in 2018’s $183 million. As for production capabilities, the National Film Institute is undergoing an expansion at their studio complex, adding four new 2500 sq. meters soundstages, increasing total studio capacity to 12,670 sq meters.
Kemeny served as a producer on Yorgos Lanthimos’ Poor Thingsthat shot in Hungary, building out everything from a fantastical Lisbon town to a luxury cruise liner. “We had hundreds of Hungarians working on that film. There was a big competition amongst many countries of where they would be filming [Poor Things] and we won out because of the economics.” Said Kemeny of the pace of production in the country: “Now, we are up to four or five production this year, just our company.”
And the Hungarian film industry has been building up its local talent. Big-budgeted international productions would often fly in talent but that has changed. Now, more than 80 percent of the production crews on large international features are formed by Hungarian talent. Notably, Hungarian production designer Zsuzsa Mihalek took home the production design Oscar at this year’s Academy Award for Poor Things.
The Nation Film Institute is currently hosting a below-the-line training program so that pool of local talent can continue to expand. The series includes practice-oriented workshops and free open lectures for junior industry professionals, as well as internship opportunities. NFI is also working with film schools, to help train students on the latest in LED wall technology, which was used in the Poor Things.
Lantos’ production Rise of the Raven, a massive middle ages-set epic 10-hour series, shot entirely in the country despite the story taking place everywhere from Serbia to Turkey. “Any production that needs castles or a fort in the 15th, 16th, and 17th century, it’s there now,” he said of the built sets. “The construction and carpentry in Hungary is unlike any place I’ve ever work. So, we made the decision to build and, boy, did we build.” Kael also noted that for any production in need of a castle, there is a larger country-wide initiative to restore and preserve old castles in the region.
Then, there is post-production. Kael shared that Francis Ford Coppola traveled to the country to record part of the score for Megalopolis (the country boasts eight symphony orchestras), while Lanthimos processed his 35mm celluloid locally at the Hungarian Film Lab/Magyar Film Labor in Budapest.
Goodridge, who will soon begin filming in the country on Son of Saul director Laszló Nemes’s next film, also noted the importance of the country’s easy access to the rest of Europe and larger hospitality industry. The panelists offered their favorite local attractions, including the food, wine and thermal baths.
Said Goodridge: “Look at the big stars and talent that have worked in Hungary. They are comfortable there and that is an important thing. You can have all the tax incentives you like but you also have to have a base of comfort for demanding foreigners.”
Last year, a new horror franchise took flight with Pooh: Blood & Honey. With the iconic bear now in the public domain, the film turned Winnie and Piglet into a pair of grim slasher villains carving up a post-grad Christopher Robin and several university students. It went over about as well as expected, but did well enough financially to kick off both its own sequel and a larger universe—sorry, Poohniverse—for more public domain characters to get a horror treatment.
Spoilers of the Week: July 22nd
Blood & Honey 2already dropped this year, so now we’re getting our first look at the whole “expanded universe” part of the thing. Per Variety, classic characters Pinocchio and Peter Pan are set to headline their own individual films, both of which are currently being sold at Cannes. Pinocchio: Unstrungtakes the boy puppet will be welcomed into the Poohniverse “with a bang,” said director Rhys Frake-Waterfield, who also helmed the two Pooh movies. The film’s being pitched as a subversion of Carlo Collodi’s classic 1883 book, and one that’ll rely more on practical gore—one scene, according to Variety, will see the title character wear the skin of one of his victims to “feel like a real boy.”
Meanwhile, Peter Pan’s Neverland Nightmareputs Martin Portlock (Scream of the Wolf) in the title role, who’s gone and kidnapped Michael (Peter DeSouza-Feighoney), the younger brother of Wendy Darling (Megan Placito). She endeavors to save him with Tinkerbell’s (Kit Green) help, who in this universe is a heroin junkie convinced that it’s actually pixie dust. Once you’re done rolling your eyeballs, the cast is further filled by Charity Kase as Captain Hook, and the likes of Kierston Wareing, Nicholas Woodeson, Olumide Olorunfemi, and Teresa Banham in currently undisclosed roles.
Like the Marvel movies this is trying to emulate, Peter and Pin are getting solo movies to prepare them for a bigger future in the so-called Twisted Childhood Universe. Both characters will converge with Pooh and Piglet in Poohniverse: Monsters Assemble in 2025, which’ll also introduce the likes of Sleeping Beauty and the Mad Hatter. The TCU aims to keep on keeping on after the crossover, because a third Blood & Honey is locked in for 2026, while solo movies for Sleeping Beauty and Snow White are also said to be in the works. Yay?
At time of writing, Peter Pan’s Neverland Nightmare is set to release later this year after production wraps, while Pinocchio: Unstrung will release in 2025 ahead of Monsters Assemble.
Then it made sense, because you really do center the women in these stories in way many movies of the genre do not.
It’s almost impossible to imagine a West without women, isn’t it? The West doesn’t carry on without women. And they understand that they were basically trying to keep their families clean and fed, and women were worked to death. And if they lost their man, there’s every opportunity that their life could become something unimaginable, bad. That’s why Sienna [Miller]’s character moves so quickly to bring a man into her life, because she knows how vulnerable she could be, and she doesn’t care about her reputation to do it. And we would taboo that now: That’s too quick, she’s moved too quick.
I am not looking for kudos because women are in it. For me, they’re not in it, they actually dominate the movie, to be honest. Every one of those women dominate when they’re on the screen.
I particularly love the casting of Jena Malone. She brings a totally different energy.
When she whacks Abbey Lee on that hill, just knocks her on the fucking head. [Laughs] It’s great. She’s [playing] a mom. She’s a mom with a guy who’s a salesman, and she’s got a renter who brings in more money than her husband. She’s got a child and she’s living in filth practically. So that’s her setup. And if you let an actress like Jena Malone go? She’s going to go.
This is the first film you’ve directed in about 20 years. Did you feel like a different director, getting back in the chair?
I’ve just always felt like everybody else is a better director than me. I just let them do their thing. That’s what I honestly feel. But when it came time for this, because I’ve done enough movies, I felt like this movie has a tone and it has to be maintained. I don’t know that I could have lived with myself if I saw scenes like where [a female character] is bathing, and somebody said, “We need to cut that out”—because women’s desire to be clean and keep their families clean was utmost. The sensuality or just a plain idea of, “Can I get this dirt off me?” turned into a very sensual moment [in the film] until it was busted by a voyeuristic situation—and we suddenly saw the scene for what it was, which was they ruined it. The minute we realized other men were watching her, we didn’t like it. What does that say? It’s simple: There’s peeping Toms in every decade, every century. There’s abusive people in every decade, every century. We have a lot in common with the people who came West. What we can’t compare, though, is how difficult it was for them. How dangerous.
Do you have a start date for part three yet?
Yeah, I’m three days into it, man. And then I go back. I’m fighting to shoot 10 more days, 12 more days if I can.
Has that fight gotten easier or harder, the deeper you’ve gotten into this?
It’s harder. It’s harder because it’s important to me that it be better that the story completely [works]. That’s why I’m not having to be, “Oh my God, it was successful.” I got to reinvent some story. I know what the story is, but it’s important to me that it just gets better and better.
This interview has been edited and condensed.
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The first iteration of the Cannes Film Festival, planned for 1939, was scuppered when Germany invaded Poland to trigger the start of World War II. But when the festival finally got off the ground in 1946, Indian cinema came out swinging. Mounted shortly after the conclusion of the war, the first “real” Cannes Film Festival featured competition entries from Billy Wilder (The Lost Weekend), Roberto Rossellini (Open City), and David Lean (Brief Encounter). In the spirit of post-war peace and reconciliation, the competition jury, headed by French historian Georges Huisman, handed the top prize — then the Grand Prix — to films from 11 of the 18 countries represented that year.
This included India, with Chetan Anand’s social-realist drama Neecha Nagar, and, for a decade at least, the country was a regular fixture in Competition. After Anand came V. Shantaram with Amar Bhoopali (1952), then Raj Kapoor with Awaara (1953), and Bimal Roy with Do Bigha Zamin (1954). But the film that put India on the map in Cannes was the debut feature by director Satyajit Ray, whose film Pather Panchali — the first of his now-famous ‘Apu Trilogy’ — was championed by prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru and won the one-off honor of Best Human Document. After Ray’s Devi in 1962, however, the run was broken, and, for a while, it seemed that Shaji N. Karun’s Swaham (1994), a Malayalam-language drama, might be the last Indian film ever to play in competition.
But now India is about to break its 30-year hiatus with Mumbai-based filmmaker Payal Kapadia’s ambitious fiction feature debut All We Imagine As Light. Shot over 25 late summer days in Mumbai, followed by an extra 15 in the rainy western port town of Ratnagiri, the Malayalam-Hindi language feature tells the story of two young women — Prabha, a nurse from Mumbai, and Anu, her roommate. A rare French-Indo co-production, it is a collaboration between the Paris-based producers Thomas Hakim and Julien Graff, of petit chaos, and Zico Maitra of Chalk & Cheese Films out of Mumbai.
All We Imagine as Light is the first feature from Maitra’s Chalk and Cheese after nine years of primarily producing commercials for television and digital media. Hakim and Graff are a buzzy-producing duo widely recognized across the European festival circuit for an impressive range of short and feature projects. The pair’s last project, The Moon Also Rises, a 24-minute Mandarin-language doc, debuted in Berlin earlier this year.
“I met Payal in 2018 at the Berlinale where she was presenting her short film And What is the Summer Saying,” Hakim says as he sneaks away from the editing suite where he and Kapadia are completing their final cut. “As we were living in different parts of the world, it didn’t seem like were meant to meet or work together. But I felt a deep connection with her cinema as if we were speaking a common language.”
Hakim says European development funds like Rotterdam’s Hubert Bals grant, and the Cannes Cinéfondation Residency, allowed Kapadia to reside in Europe, where they could develop their joint practice before mounting the ambitious production in her native India. “The French and European funding system, through CNC, Eurimages, the Gan Foundation, Cineworld, Visions Sud Est, and Hubert Bals, along with private partners like Arte, Luxbox, Condor, and Pulpa Film allowed us to gather the financing and shoot the entire film in India, with a 99% Indian cast and crew,” he adds. “In the process, it was important that this co-production stayed organic and didn’t alter Payal’s vision with unnecessary constraints.”
An alumnus of the state-run Film and Television Institute of India (FTII), Kapadia has history at Cannes. In 2017, she screened Afternoon Clouds, a 13-minute project, as part of the festival’s Cinéfondation shorts sidebar. Her last film, the non-fiction project A Night of Knowing Nothing (2021), also produced by Hakim and Graff for petit chaos, screened in Director’s Fortnight, where it won the Golden Eye for best documentary.
Set mainly at the FTII, A Night of Knowing Nothing is perhaps best described as a kaleidoscopic mix of fiction and documentary filmmaking centered around India’s anti-caste movement, as explored through the lives of two film students who have been forced to end their inter-caste relationship. Kapadia began shooting it in the wake of a months-long student strike at FTII, protesting against the Narendra Modi government’s appointment of TV actor and right-wing politician Gajendra Chauhan as the university’s new chairman.
Similar themes are explored by British-Indian filmmaker Sandhya Suri in her feature Santosh, also set for the Riviera, where it will debut in Un Certain Regard. Developed at Sundance’s screenwriting and directing labs, Santosh follows a recently widowed woman, played by Shahana Goswami (Zwigato, A Suitable Boy), who inherits her husband’s job as a police constable in Northern India. When a low-caste girl is found raped and murdered, she is pulled into the investigation.
Suri explains that the film was born of her desire to find a “meaningful way” to talk about violence against women. “I was in India researching and working with various NGOs when I came across an image,” she says. It was a photograph taken at one of the nationwide protests following the notorious case of 2012, in which a 22-year-old physiotherapy student was gang-raped and fatally wounded on a public bus (the anonymous woman was initially known as ‘Nirbhaya’ — a Hindi word meaning ‘fearless’ — since Indian law prohibited the naming of rape victims).
“The photograph,” says Suri, “was an image from Delhi of a huge crowd of angry female protestors, their faces contorted with rage, and a line of female police officers, forcing them back. One of them had such an enigmatic expression. I was fascinated by her. What a gulf between her and those protesting, what power her uniform wielded, and what powerlessness not to feel safe as an ordinary woman. To explore this violence and her power within it felt exciting.”
Sister Midnight
Protagonist Pictures
Santosh is Suri’s narrative directorial debut. Backed by the BFI and BBC Film in co-production with ZDF/ARTE and the CNC, the Hindi-language film was shot over 44 days around the city of Lucknow, Uttar Pradesh, India. An alumnus of the U.K.’s National Film and Television School, she’s best known internationally for the feature documentary I For India, which premiered in the World Competition section at the Sundance Film Festival in 2006 and charts her family’s experience migrating from India to Britain in the 1960s. She also directed the BAFTA-nominated short The Field.
“I’ve been developing and researching this film for almost a decade,” says Suri, “so it’s been a long, slow burn and such a huge delight to be selected after all that to Un Certain Regard for my first fiction film.”
Also in Un Certain Regard is Bulgarian filmmaker Konstantin Bojanov, who has also turned to India for his Un Certain Regard title The Shameless, his follow-up to the 2017 Barry Keoghan-starrer Light Thereafter. The film deals with the taboo subject of sex work, telling the story of a woman who flees a Delhi brothel after stabbing a policeman to death. Meanwhile, in Directors’ Fortnight, Karan Kandhari’s black comedy Sister Midnight follows a smalltown misfit (Radhika Apte) struggling with an arranged marriage. The British Council has described it as, “A fantastical punk comedy, a feminist revenge film, and a revamped vampire movie rolled into one.”
Read the digital edition of Deadline’s Disruptors/Cannes magazine here.
And if the return of Indian voices isn’t enough, All We Imagine As Light is about to make another kind of history: Kapadia will be the first Indian woman ever to compete for the Palme d’Or.
“The outpouring of love all across the country for the historical Cannes selection has been heartening to witness,” says Zico Maitra. “I hope there will be more and more support from Indian financiers for independent films and filmmakers like Payal, and that the success of this film can be the catalyst that humbly inspires others.”
Kapadia described her selection as “thrilling and humbling” in a statement shortly after Thierry Frémaux’s opening press conference. “I admire many directors selected in this section,” she said, “both in the past and present. It’s an immense honor to be showing my film among them.” Meanwhile, rushing back to the editing suite, Hakim adds: “We are very proud that our film brings India back to the main Competition of Cannes.”
Gio Ventura was first introduced to acting via a poster in his high school, which was a call for auditions for a student short film. “I went to the casting and then I realized that the role was inspired by my ex-girlfriend. [The director] didn’t know I recognized her,” Ventura says with a laugh. “It was really easy to get into the character.”
Ventura would spend the next couple of years acting in a handful of short films before heading to Paris, where he began his professional career five years ago. He says of the city: “I got to meet more queer filmmakers that were making the movies that I actually go to see.”
One of those filmmakers was Alexis Langlois, who in 2021 directed the campy, queer horror comedy short The Demons of Dorothy, about a screenwriter who must focus on mainstream films instead of making campy, queer horror comedies. Dorothy is reminiscent of John Waters’ oeuvre, filled with hyperbole, subversion and lots of glitter.
“In France, Alexis is one of the only people who makes cinema that has a real visual presentation. I know it’s a thing in the U.S., but it’s not really in France, so it’s very special,” says Ventura. Langlois’ films sit in stark contrast to the more grounded fare that is synonymous with contemporary French cinema, Ventura adds: “In France, we have very realistic movies. He’s very interested in extreme femininity, but it’s beyond that — it’s like it almost touches something that is more monstrous. It’s queer, in the real sense of the word.”
Taken by his work, Ventura attempted to make contact. “I wrote him a message on Facebook a couple of years ago and he replied with something very polite, like, ‘Thank you.’ I replied: ‘You know, I’m an actor …’ He didn’t really react,” remembers Ventura, who later ran into the director at a film festival party. “I was drunk and I just went up to him: ‘Do you remember me? I wrote you a message. I want to act for you!’ ” With Langlois’ latest, Queens of Drama, Ventura got his wish, co-starring in the film that is set to screen in Cannes as part of the Critics’ Week, which is a sidebar to the Cannes Film Festival.
Queens of Drama tells the early aughts love story of pop icon Mimi Madamour (played by Louiza Aura) and punk rocker Billie Kohler (Ventura), whose tumultuous relationship inspired the music that helped each of them climb the charts but also inspired much heartache. Queens of Drama is told in flashbacks, with a fanatic YouTuber serving as the audience’s guide.
Unlike Ventura, Aura wasn’t looking for a career in performance, let alone a role in Langlois’ movie. “I actually got into acting totally by chance, it wasn’t something that I ever wanted to do,” says Aura, who was working as a model. “I had gone to a premiere screening for a film and someone saw me there. One thing led to another, and I had an agent.” Shortly after, she booked her first acting role in Queens of Drama.
Set in 2005, the movie is a fever dream of early aughts nostalgia, filled with music show parodies (à la American Idol) and low-rise pants. Langlois and his stars shared a Dropbox folder of inspiration and imagery from the time period, the zenith of the pop diva and the “girl power” groups, complete with images of Mariah Carey and Britney Spears.
Between casting and the start of production, there was a long delay, during which the stars rehearsed every week for nine months. “It would have been quite a different film had we not had all of this rehearsal time,” says Aura. They took the time to establish their onscreen relationship and practice their choreography. French artists Rebeka Warrior and Yelle helped produce the original music in the film.
Filming on Queens of Drama took place over five weeks in Brussels, Belgium. During that time, Ventura and Aura shot scenes of onscreen competition shows, grunge concerts, music videos, awards show speeches and talk show meltdowns. Interspersed throughout the fun, camp and, yes, drama, the duo shot a simple love story about losing your love and finding your way back to them.
Asked what she hopes audiences take away from the audacious movie, Aura says simply, “I hope they cry.”
At the start of the year, it was reported that Francis Ford Coppola’s long-awaited sci-fi flick Megalopolismight finally see the light of day. That day appears to be pretty soon, because Coppola’s production banner American Zoetrope released first-ever footage of the film that gives an idea of its scope.
Giancarlo Esposito Talks About the Coppola Movie You Might Never See, Megalopolis
In the clip, Adam Driver’s Cesar heads to the roof of a New York skyscraper. Absolutely terrified out of his mind, he eventually works up the courage to take a step off the ledge, only to nearly plummet to his death before shouting, “Time, stop!” Time does indeed stop—along with gravity, it seems, allowing him to get back on his feet and not wind up a pancake. With a snap of his fingers, time resumes once again, and Cesar’s awestruck at his own power—whatever it is.
MEGALOPOLIS | Les premières images
Megalopolis has been previously described as a sci-fi love story between Cesar and Julia Cicero (Nathalie Emmanuel). Caught between Cesar and her father Frank’s (Giancarlo Esposito) opposing visions for New York, she embarks on a journey to figure out her own path as the two men still fight over the city. Screenings were recently held for studio executives and some press, and impressions were reportedly mixed across the board: some respected how imaginative and “unflinchingly batshit crazy” it was, others thought it went all over the place and a likely dud at the box office.
At time of writing, Megalopolis doesn’t have a North American distributor—Amazon MGM and Apple have both reportedly shown interest—but it is set to premiere at Cannes on May 17. However things shake out, Coppola’s proud of it: the film is dedicated to his late wife Eleanor Neil, who passed last month, and considers the preview above a “gift on her behalf.”
The Cannes Film Festival has picked its full jury.
Oscar-nominated The Killers of the Flower Moon lead Lily Gladstone, French stars Eva Green and Omar Sy and Italian actor Pierfrancisco Favino are among the A-listers who will join Barbie director Greta Gerwig, this year’s jury president for the 77th Cannes Film Festival, selecting the winners, including the best film Palme d’Or, from the 2024 competition lineup.
A trio of international Oscar-nominated directors: Lebanese filmmaker Nadine Labaki (Capernaum), Spain’s Juan Antonio Bayona (Society of the Snow) and Japanese director Kore-eda Hirokazu (Shoplifters), as well as Turkish screenwriter and photographer Ebru Ceylan, co-writer of 2014 Palme d’Or winner Winter Sleep (with director husband Nuri Bilge Ceylan), complete the five-women, four-man jury.
Among the films in the running for this year’s Palme d’Or are Francis Ford Coppola’s long-anticipated Megalopolis; Yorgos Lanthimos’ Poor Things follow-up Kinds of Kindness; Bird from Scottish director Andrea Arnold; David Cronenberg’s The Shrouds; and Ali Abbasi’s Donald Trump drama The Apprentice.
The 2024 Cannes Festival kicks off May 14 with The Second Act, a surreal comedy from French director Quentin Dupieux (Smoking Causes Coughing) starring Léa Seydoux and Vincent Lindon. It will premiere out of competition, as will George Miller’s Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga, the latest in the Australian apocalypse franchise, starring Anya Taylor-Joy; and Kevin Costner’s Western epic Horizons: An American Saga – Chapter 1.
Cannes juries have a strong track record in picking breakout award season contenders. Last year’s Palme winner, Justine Triet’s Anatomy of a Fall, went from success on the Croisette all the way to the Oscars, where the French film won the Academy Award for best original screenplay and scored a best actress nom for breakout star Sandra Hüller.
Francis Ford Coppola‘s highly anticipated, self-funded feature Megalopolis has landed a Cannes debut. The film will screen in competition at the festival on May 17 in a gala premiere at the 77th annual festival.
The project follows the rebuilding of a metropolis after its accidental destruction, with two competing visions — one from an idealist architect (Adam Driver), the other from its pragmatist mayor (Giancarlo Esposito) — clashing during the process. Shia LaBeouf, Laurence Fishburne and Aubrey Plaza round out the cast.
The project, which Coppola first began writing in 1983, cost a reported $120 million to make — funded in part by the sale of a significant portion of his wine empire. Recently, the film had a screening for potential buyers, with Universal’s Donna Langley, Netflix’s Ted Sarandos and Sony’s Tom Rothman in attendance at Universal CityWalk. It is still seeking distribution, but the filmmaker has noted his desire for an Imax release.
Several in attendance at the Megalopolisscreening described their experiences to The Hollywood Reporter, with one studio head saying, “It’s so not good, and it was so sad watching it. Anybody who puts P&A behind it, you’re going to lose money.” Another offered: “I liked it enormously.”
Coppola famously brought another of his fraught features, Apocalypse Now, to the festival. It became the first stop on a long journey to acclaim.
Megalopolis joins already-announced titles like Kevin Costner’s Horizon, another self-funded epic, and George Miller’s Mad Max title Furiosa. The rest of the Cannes line-up will be announced on April 11.
