Palestinian Tawfeek Barhom directed, wrote and co-stars in the 13-minute drama, which is a co-production between Palestine, France and Greece. The film also stars Ashraf Barhom.
“I’m Glad You’re Dead Now”
Courtesy of Tawfeek Barhom, Kidam, Foss Productions
The story follows two brothers who return to the island of their childhood, where hidden tensions and long-buried secrets force them to confront a haunting past that binds them together.
Phoenix said, “This is a film that confronts memory, trauma, and reconciliation in a way that feels urgent and necessary today. I’m proud to be part of its future.”
Mara added, “From the moment I saw ‘I’m Glad You’re Dead Now,’ its emotional weight and restrained power stayed with me. I am honored to support Tawfeek’s vision and the film’s continuing journey.”
Barhom said, “I am deeply moved that Rooney Mara and Joaquin Phoenix have chosen to stand with this film and its story. Their belief honors the film’s spirit, and their creative support will be invaluable as we take ‘I’m Glad You’re Dead Now’ to wider audiences.”
The producers said Phoenix and Mara will “participate in upcoming press, festival introductions, and strategic collaborations to ensure the film’s continued impact and reach.”
The film is co-produced by France’s Kidam and Greece’s Foss Productions. Kidam is best known for “Zero F**** Given” (Critics’ Week, Cannes, 2021), starring Adèle Exarchopoulos. Foss Productions has produced or co-produced many short and feature films, such as “Suntan,” “Pity” and “Echoes of the Past.”
The producers are Tawfeek Barhom, Akis Polizos, Stylianos Kotionis and Alexandre Perrier.
VENICE, Italy — Some of Hollywood’s biggest stars are heading to Venice, Italy, for the 82nd edition of the Venice Film Festival, which kicks off on Wednesday.
Here’s a rundown of everything you need to know about the festival, the Oscar buzz and who’s going.
It’s one of the most prestigious film festivals in the world, second only to Cannes, and technically the oldest. Venice is also a reliably starry affair, gathering some of the best films in international cinema and often factoring into the Oscars race.
The film festival was established in 1932, then a non-competitive event, by the La Biennale di Venezia, hosting films like “Grand Hotel” and “It Happened One Night.” By 1935, they decided to make it an annual event. Suspicions that the festival was succumbing to fascist influences actually led to the establishment of the Cannes Film Festival, as an alternative, after the 1938 edition.
The Golden Lion award as we know it today wouldn’t be introduced until 1949 (“Rashômon” won in 1951). Other winners throughout history include “Belle de jour” (1967), “Au revoir les enfants” (1987), “Brokeback Mountain” (2005), “Somewhere” (2010), “Poor Things” (2023) and, last year, “The Room Next Door.”
The festival kicks off on Wednesday and runs through Sept. 6, when the awards will be announced. The opening night film is Paolo Sorrentino’s “La Grazia.”
Julia Roberts, George Clooney, Emma Stone, Dwayne Johnson, Adam Sandler and Idris Elba are among the stars expected to grace the red carpets this year. It’ll be the first time at the festival for both Roberts, starring in the #MeToo-themed drama “After the Hunt,” and Johnson, who transformed for his role as MMA fighter Mark Kerr in “The Smashing Machine.”
Other stars in the lineup include Oscar Isaac, Jacob Elordi, Jesse Plemons, Cate Blanchett, Adam Driver, Andrew Garfield, Ayo Edebiri, Bill Skarsgård, Colman Domingo, Amanda Seyfried, Callum Turner and Jude Law. Lifetime achievement award recipients this year include “Vertigo” star Kim Novak and filmmaker Werner Herzog.
After taking a year off, Netflix, still on the hunt for a best picture win, is back in full force with three major films in the main competition: Guillermo Del Toro’s “Frankenstein,” Kathryn Bigelow’s political thriller “A House of Dynamite,” and Noah Baumbach’s comedic drama “Jay Kelly.” Also in competition are: Kaouther ben Hania’s “The Voice of Hind Rajab”; Yorgos Lanthimos’ “Bugonia,” with Emma Stone; Benny Safdie’s “The Smashing Machine”; Jim Jarmusch’s anthology film “Father Mother Sister Brother”; Mona Fastvold’s musical about the Shakers, “The Testament of Ann Lee”; Park Chan-wook’s “No Other Choice”; and Olivier Assayas’s “The Wizard of the Kremlin.”
The buzz is strong for several out-of-competition films too, like Luca Guadagnino’s “After the Hunt,” Gus Van Sant’s “Dead Man’s Wire,” Julian Schnabel’s “In the Hand of Dante” and Sofia Coppola’s Marc Jacobs documentary “Marc by Sofia.”
Festival director Alberto Barbera thinks Venice’s place in the Oscar race was solidified in 2012, when they hosted the premiere of “Gravity,” which went on to win a leading seven Oscars that March and established Venice as a place to launch a campaign. It’s only intensified as the membership of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has gotten more international. Since 2014, they’ve hosted four best picture winners (“Birdman,” “Spotlight,” “The Shape of Water” and “Nomadland”).
Last year, the festival had several eventual Oscar-winning films in the lineup, including Brady Corbet’s “The Brutalist,” which won three including best actor for Adrien Brody, Walter Salles’ best international feature winner “I’m Still Here,” and the animated short “In the Shadow of the Cypress.”
When people think of Venice, they usually think of landmarks like the Rialto bridge and St. Mark’s Square. The festival actually takes place on a different island, a nearly 7-mile (11-kilometer) barrier island called the Lido, which is about a 20-minute ferry (vaporetto) ride away.
A military outpost in the 12th century, it transformed into a seaside resort, a favorite of European aristocrats, by the end of the 19th.
On the Lido, the only five-star hotel is the Hotel Excelsior, which dates back to 1908 and is where Quentin Tarantino has stayed. But rooms go quickly, and there are so many luxury hotels on the different islands that offer a bit more privacy, away from the frenzy of the festival and photographers.
Perhaps the most famous of the bunch is the Belmond Hotel Cipriani, on Giudecca, home of one of Clooney’s favorite bars. There’s the Hotel Danieli, which has been featured in films like “Moonraker” and “Casino Royale,” and regularly hosts kickoff parties for the festival. Another favorite is the Gritti Palace, where everyone from Brad Pitt to Elizabeth Taylor has stayed. There’s also a St. Regis and the Aman Venice, where George and Amal Clooney were married.
The scattered hotels are also the reason you see so many celebrities photographed on the Excelsior docks: They arrive to the festival, including press conferences and premieres, by private water taxi. Sometimes, they’re transported a very short distance from the Excelsior to the red carpet in cars. Unlike the main island of Venice, vehicles are allowed on the Lido, including buses and private cars. But many festivalgoers prefer to rent a bike to get around.
“Nebraska” filmmaker Alexander Payne is presiding over the main competition jury, which includes Brazilian actor Fernanda Torres, Iranian director Mohammad Rasoulof, French director Stéphane Brizé, Italian director Maura Delpero, Chinese actor Zhao Tao and Romanian director Cristian Mungiu. The award winners will be announced on Sept. 6.
India’s Zee Studios has set a late November theatrical release for “Dhadak 2,” a romance film challenging societal norms.
The film is a sequel to 2016 hit “Dhadak,” that was itself a Hindi remake of the Marathi film “Sairat.” The 2016 title starred Ishaan Khatter and Janhvi Kapoor, as well as the late Sridevi.
The new film is directed by Shazia Iqbal and stars Siddhant Chaturvedi and Triptii Dimri in lead roles. Plot details were scarce, though Zee teased it with the logline: [the film] “explores barriers of class and status stitched in the minds of societies, underscoring a narrative of love that can never be fulfilled. Or can it?”
Production is by Zee Studios, Karan Johar’s Dharma Productions, and Cloud 9 Pictures and is slated for release on Nov. 22, 2024, a slot that falls neatly between Diwali and Christmas.
Watch the teaser here:
CALLING HER BLUFF
Production is set to start imminently in Australia on “The Bluff,” a 19th-century-set film about a female pirate who must protect her family as the consequences of her past catch up with her. It stars Priyanka Chopra Jonas and Karl Urban and is being produced by AGBO for Amazon’s Prime Video service.
The Bluff’ is set to be directed by Frank E. Flowers, who also co-wrote the screenplay with Joe Ballarini.
The producers include Chopra Jonas, AGBO’s Anthony Russo, Joe Russo, Angela Russo-Otstot and Michael Disco, Cinestar Pictures’ Cisely Saldana and Mariel Saldana.
Chopra Jonas posted Instagram pictures of herself and her daughter arriving Down Under for the start of production.
GIVING A FIG
Australia’s Sharmill Films is to give a theatrical release to “The Seed of the Sacred Fig,” the Cannes Special Award- and FIPRESCI Award-winning film by Iran’s Mohammad Rasoulof. The director was not permitted to leave his home country, but did so anyway to attend the Cannes Film Festival premiere of his picture.
Dubai-based pay-TV and streamer OSN has renewed its multi-year partnership with Warner Bros under an expanded deal that will bring all new first-run Max Originals and Warner Bros. Pictures movies exclusively to its OSN+ streamer and OSNTV customers across the Middle East and North African (MENA) region.
REUPPING
Dubai-based pay-TV and streamer OSN has renewed its multi-year partnership with Warner Bros. under an expanded deal that will bring all new first-run Max Originals and Warner Bros. Pictures movies exclusively to its OSN+ streamer and OSNTV customers across the Middle East and North African (MENA) region.
OSN subscribers will now have access to Warner Bros. Pictures’ film catalogue and exclusive Pay 1 features in MENA following their theatrical and home entertainment runs. High-profile titles include “Barbie”; “Wonka”; “Dune: Part Two” and “Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire,” as well as upcoming Max Originals “Dune: Prophecy” and “The Penguin.”
Joe Kawkabani, group CEO at OSN commented: “Today we strengthen our longstanding partnership with Warner Bros. Discovery with yet another exclusive deal that will further expand OSN+ and OSNtv’s content libraries and bring the studio’s biggest global films and new Max Originals to our platforms first.”
The 77th Cannes Film Festival draws to a close Saturday with the presentation of its top award, the Palme d’Or, along with an honorary tribute for George Lucas.
The closing ceremony is set to begin at 6:45 p.m. local time, 12:45 p.m. U.S. Eastern time. It will be streamed live on Brut internationally and air on France 2 within France.
Any of the 22 films that premiered in competition at Cannes are eligible for the Palme d’Or and other prizes, like the Grand Prix, best actress and best actor. Deciding them all will be the nine-person jury presided over, this year, by Greta Gerwig.
The jury’s deliberations take place in secret, so anything could potentially win. But a handful of films are seen as the most likely contenders, among them Payal Kapadia’s “All We Imagine As Light,” Mohammad Rasoulof’s “The Seed of the Sacred Fig” and Sean Baker’s “Anora.”
“The Seed of the Sacred Fig,” about an Iranian family living through the country’s 2022 protests, was shot clandestinely in Iran and includes real videos from the demonstrations. Just ahead of its Cannes debut, Rasoulof, facing an eight-year prison sentence, fled Iran. He arrived in Cannes several days ago and, on the red carpet, held up photographs of two of his actors, Soheila Golestani and Missagh Zareh.
“All We Imagine As Light,” the first Indian film in competition in Cannes in 30 years, is about two nurses who forge a bond in modern Mumbai. It’s Kapadia’s second feature, following the documentary “A Night of Knowing Nothing.”
“Anora,” by the American filmmaker of “The Florida Project,” is about a Brooklyn sex worker who marries the son of a wealthy Russian oligarch, provoking a farcical rush to annul the marriage. The film’s star, Mikey Madison, gives one of the most widely hailed performances of the festival.
Other much talked about entries include the sci-fi epic “Megalopolis” from Francis Ford Coppola, a two-time winner of the Palme d’Or; Coralie Fargeat’s gory body-horror satire “The Substance,” starring Demi Moore; and Jacques Audiard’s “Emilia Perez,” a Spanish-language musical about a Mexican drug lord who transitions to a woman. Audiard previously won the Palme for 2015’s “Dheepan.”
During the brief awards ceremony, Lucas will be given an honorary Palme d’Or. During the festival, Cannes gave the same tribute to Meryl Streep and the Japanese anime factory Studio Ghibli.
Following the awards, the winner of the Palme will be screened for the audience in the Grand Théâtre Lumière.
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For more coverage of the 2024 Cannes Film Festival, visit https://apnews.com/hub/cannes-film-festival.
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 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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CANNES, France — A month before Kevin Costner puts the first installment of his multi-chapter Western “Horizon: An American Saga” into theaters, the actor-director came to the Cannes Film Festival to unveil his self-financed passion project.
“Two of my boys are out fishing right now,” Costner said with a grin in an interview at the Carlton Hotel. “And the three girls found their way onto a boat. So dad’s in here, stumping for his movie.”
The movie is actually two, or if Costner has his way, four. “Horizon: Chapter One,” which runs three hours, will be released by Warner Bros. in theaters June 28. “Chapter Two” follows August 16. Costner has scripts ready for parts three and four.
It’s only the fourth time Costner, 69, has directed, following 1990’s “Dances With Wolves,” 1997’s “The Postman” and 2003’s “Open Range.” But when he has, Costner has usually done it with a clear-eyed passion for storytelling and character. That’s on display in the wide-ranging epic “Horizon,” with a cast including Sienna Miller, Abbey Lee, Sam Worthington and Costner.
It’s also Costner’s biggest gamble, ever. To raise the money for the $100 million-plus production, he mortgaged his seaside Santa Barbara, California, estate. He’s been trying to make “Horizon” for more than 30 years.
“I thank God for Cannes. I’m an independent filmmaker, essentially, and I’m here by myself,” said Costner, whose film was to premiere Sunday. “So this is a high moment for me because it’s helping me create awareness for a movie. I don’t have all the money in the world to expose this movie. But I have my time and a platform here.”
Remarks have been lightly edited for brevity.
COSTNER: You can spend your life just trying to make your pile grow bigger and bigger. And I’ve not been really terribly great at that. I’m like anyone else, I’d like it to be big. But not at the expense of not doing what I feel like I’ve love to do. If no one will help me do it and I believe strongly in its entertainment value — there’s commerce on my mind. But I don’t let it overshadow the entertainment value and essence of what I’m trying to portray. I don’t try to let the fear of that control my instincts on any level. I don’t want to live that way. If I was watching a movie about me and I thought, “Oo, don’t risk your money and make something like that,” what a (expletive).
COSTNER: No, it wasn’t an easy decision, but it was the decision I needed to make. It’s like, wow, why am I having to do this? I think I’m making mainstream entertainment. I don’t know what you felt about the movie but I felt like it’s really mainstream. I don’t feel that I’m an avant-garde type of a person. But yet I think my things are a little off. I’m willing to (in a wagon trail scene in the film) see a woman bathe because her desire to be clean was so pronounced. If you’re a woman, who wouldn’t want to be? But then in the next moment, you realize it’s against the rule, man. You could cost yourself your life. So that scene became important to make the next scene important. To me, a scene like that is just as important as a gun fight. And if that kind of scene doesn’t want to exist in a mainstream movie…
COSTNER: I guess. It will be. They’re going to break this up into a hundred pieces, you know what I mean? After four of these, they’re going to have 13, 14 hours of film and they’re going to turn into 25 hours of TV, and they’re going to do whatever they’re going to do. That’s just the way we live in our life but they’ll also exist in this form. And that was important for me, to make sure that happened. And I was the one who paid for it.
COSTNER: The studio wanted to try that. I knew this was going to come out fairly quickly, like every four or five months. That may have been easier. But this is something they feel like people can remember the first one and it can tie into the second one. I built into all of them a montage of what’s coming.
COSTNER: I like seeing behavior in men that makes sense. I make movies for men. I just make sure there’s great women characters because that’s really important to me. The backbone of our movie is actually women. I don’t like boys behaving stupid. I like the little boy who (fleeing an attack) takes the two horses and effectively saves his life. I like seeing people behave honestly in desperate situations. The heroism of a little boy saying “I’ll stay with you, Dad” is a really powerful moment. That’s my son (Hayes Costner) and it was very hard to watch.
COSTNER: Confusion about it. The colonel says, “If we salt the earth with enough of their dead, the wagons won’t come anymore.” When you’re that far out there, you can’t go. When people said goodbye in the East Coast, they didn’t come back. So the confusion for the Native American was they couldn’t make sense of that. Normally if you kill enough people they won’t bother you. But these Americans, these people were getting flyers saying you could have this land. There are salesmen in every century, every decade selling something they don’t really know what it is. It’s just America. It’s just this giant experiment of hope.
COSTNER: When they weren’t useful, they were just cast away. And they had to create a sense of community and they came en masse. They came together and they were very industrious. They’ll be the wealthiest people in that town until there’s a tipping point and racism kicks in and suddenly they’re gone, too. You watch. That’s what would happen in real life.
COSTNER: There’s inevitable tragedy to it. And there’s divisions. You see a whole tribe break in half. You see a father break from a son.
COSTNER: I’ve shot three days and I continue to have to press for money to finish this. I have to figure out what else I can do to make this. But I’m not waiting to see how people feel. I know what this is, and I think if people love the movie experience, they have a really good chance of wanting to see the next one. That’s all I can believe. The prudent thing would be to wait, but I guess I’m not built for that wait.
COSTNER: “Yellowstone” was really important in my life. I really loved that world and what we were able to do in five seasons. I only thought it would be one, but did five. I was willing to do three more – five, six and seven – but it just didn’t happen. Certain things were going on and it just didn’t happen. So the idea of going back, I’m open to that idea. But it’s based on everything that first three or four were based on, which is the scripts.
Thirty-four years ago, Kevin Costner debuted his corny, stirring, culturally iffy Western drama Dances with Wolves. It would go on to win a heap of Oscars, including the director prize for Costner. That success seemed to augur the arrival of a new actor-turned-auteur, a whole two years before Clint Eastwood won his Oscar for Unforgiven. But Costner’s directorial follow-up, The Postman, rang not even once; it was an expensive debacle that kept Costner away from the director’s chair for nearly a decade. He then returned to form, on a smaller scale, for Open Range, before going dormant once more.
In recent years, though, Costner has had a revival as an actor on the smash-hit neo-Western series Yellowstone. This, in turn, has given him the cachet to once again revisit the open skies and blazing guns of his cherished genre. He quit the series (for various scheduling reasons, it has been reported) and got to work on Horizon: An American Saga, a four-part epic that, one hoped, would be the kind of sweeping, old-fashioned movie event (of the non-superhero or sci-fi kind) that hardly exists anymore.
Chapter 1 of Horizon premiered at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, which seemed like a good omen. Surely this swank, pomp-and-circumstance festival would only premiere a film of quality—it could be a little hokey, but there’s nothing wrong with that if done well. But unfortunately, Horizon is far from stately, or even coherent. A jumble of clichéd plots rendered in washed-out color (and washed-out performances), Horizon may rival Megalopolis as the biggest American boondoggle at this year’s Cannes. Sure, what appears disorderly may turn out to be genius by the time we’ve seen the end of the project—but ten hours is an awfully long time to wait to find out.
The strangest, most dismaying thing about the film is that it doesn’t feel like a film at all. Costner, who co-wrote the script with Jon Baird, introduces us to a television season’s worth of characters and plot threads. He jumps from one location to another, much as Game of Thrones did. Yet Costner never lets us feel the grand interconnectedness of these stories. They play as distractions from each other, intruding when something else was maybe, possibly about to find some traction. The film ends with a scenes-from-the-next-installment clip reel, as if to entice us with more to come. But despite the first chapter’s three-hour runtime, we haven’t been given space to get interested in what’s being teased. The writing and direction is so erratic and confused that it’s near impossible to figure out who several characters are, let alone what they are seeking to accomplish.
The three central narratives, as I see it, concern the ragged townspeople of a settlement in the San Pedro River valley (called Horizon) ; a gruff gunslinger making his way across the mountains further north with a woman and a child in tow; and a Santa Fe Trail wagon train snaking its way toward Horizon. (I think?) There is, halfheartedly, a fourth thread, about schisms within the Apache tribes who are native to the territory on which Horizon was hastily built. But the film only pays them lip service. Mostly they function as the brutal antagonizers of the Horizon townsfolk, who are nearly wiped out in a nighttime raid that is one of the film’s very few action sequences—the rest is the dullest and hoariest of talk.
Urban Sales has closed a raft of deals on the upcoming animated feature “Into the Wonderwoods” ahead of its world premiere at the Cannes Film Festival in the Special Screenings section.
The film, which bows with a special screening May 22 at the prestigious French fest, has sold to 45 territories, the Paris-based sales outfit announced during the Cannes Market. Pic has sold to Volga for the CIS territories and the Baltics; Selim Ramia & Co. for the MENA region; Skyline for Vietnam; New Horizons for Poland; Ascot Elite for Switzerland; Movies Inspired for Italy; Vercine for Spain; and Pris Audiovisuais for Portugal.
The family animation next travels to the Annecy International Animation Film Festival to compete in the main competition for the prestigious Cristal award. Le Pacte will be releasing the film in France on Oct. 23. Advanced negotiations are ongoing for Benelux, China, Germany, Turkey, Latin America and North America.
“Into the Wonderwoods” is co-directed by Oscar nominee and Cannes Jury Prize winner Vincent Paronnaud (“Persepolis”) and Alexis Ducord (“Zombillenium”). Budgeted at $10 million, it’s based on a comic book that Paronnaud created under the pseudonym Winshluss.
The family film follows 10-year-old Angelo, who dreams of becoming an explorer and a zoologist. When he hits the road with his family to visit his beloved granny, his distracted parents leave him behind at a rest stop. Left to his own devices, Angelo decides to cut through the forest in search of his family. He enters a dark and mysterious world inhabited by strange creatures, some friendlier than others.
Pic is produced by animation banners Je Suis Bien Content (“Persepolis”), Gaoshan Pictures (“Le Petit Nicolas,” “I Lost My Body”) and Zeilt Productions (“Mr. Hublot”) and features the voice work of actors Philippe Catherine, Jose Garcia and Yolande Moreau.
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.”
Awards season has wrapped, fashion week is behind us and we’ve just about caught our breath post-Met Gala, but if you thought that was it for major red carpet moments for a while we’ve got some great news for you.
Having kicked off 2024’s instalment on Tuesday, May 14th and continuing every day through until Saturday, May 25th, the annual Cannes Film Festival premieres films of all genres and plays host to a particularly star-studded red carpet that welcomes many of the world’s top actors, models, musicians and celebrity personalities nightly.
Off to a strong start, descending on the French Riviera so far this week we’ve spotted Naomi Campbell in Chanel, Meryl Streep in Dior, Heidi Klum in Saiid Kobeisy, Helena Christensen in Pomellato, Sabrina Elba in Fendi Couture, Léa Seydoux in Louis Vuitton, Greta Gerwig in Saint Laurent, Anya Taylor-Joy in Dior Haute Couture, and, of course, Anya Taylor-Joy’s hair – which undeniably stole the show on Wednesday night at the Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga premiere.
Marc Piasecki
While the festival is primarily put on to celebrate the world of film, there’s no getting away from the fact that it’s also a real celebration of fashion.
Below, we’ve rounded up all the best dresses of the festival so far. Watch this space as we keep you updated with all the major fashion moments to see from the Cannes Film Festival 2024 throughout the showcase…
Gravitas Ventures has picked up the documentary Stylebender, on the UFC Middleweight phenomenon and former world champion Israel Adesanya, for North America.
Zoë McIntosh followed Adesanya, known in the ring as “the last stylebender” for five years making the non-fiction feature, which premiered at the Tribeca film festival last year. Stylebender is less a classic sports doc than an exploration of Adesanya’s origins, family upbringing, and his struggles, as a shy Nigerian kid, growing up in rural New Zealand in the 2000s, to find his own way in the world. We see Adesanya working with his trainer and mentor, Eugene Bareman, as well as his therapist, as he discusses issues of masculinity, bullying, and mental health.
“After screening Stylebender in Tribeca, I could feel in my bones there was something supremely special about this film, and about Adesanya’s story,” said Gravitas’ Danielle Gasher. “There is a vulnerable and deeply human quality to the film, which I believe will be felt far and large by audiences across North America.”
Gravitas has a talent for spotting international breakout docs. In 2021 the company picked up the Chilean documentary The Mole Agent, which went on to secure an Oscar nomination for best documentary.
The deal for Stylebender was negotiated by Gravitas’ Danielle Gasher, VP Acquisitions & International Sales, with Mister Smith Entertainment’s VP International Sales & Distribution, Shane Kelly. Mister Smith Entertainment co-reps North American rights with WME for the film. Ahi Films is handling the release of Stylebender in Australia and New Zealand.
It’s time for one of the most glamorous events of the year—the Cannes Film Festival. Every May, filmmakers, producers, directors, actors and other A-listers make their way to the French Riviera for 12 days of movie screenings, parties and, of course, plenty of glitzy red carpets and exciting fashion moments on La Croisette.
The 2024 Cannes Film Festival runs from May 14 to May 25, and we’re keeping you updated on all the best red carpet moments throughout the entire spectacle. Below, see the best-dressed looks from the Cannes Film Festival red carpet.
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.
Chef and restaurateur Jose Andrés inviting actors Jamie Lee Curtis, Bryan Cranston and O’Shea Jackson Jr. over for dinner in a new TV special and Jake Gyllenhaal starring in an update of the pulpy cult classic “Road House” are some of the new television, movies, music and games headed to a device near you.
Also among the streaming offerings worth your time as selected by The Associated Press’ entertainment journalists: Shakira releases her first album in seven years, Paul Simon gets an expansive two-part documentary on MGM+ and a Nintendo sweetheart takes center stage in the game Princess Peach: Showtime!
— Fresh off its Oscar success, Justine Triet’s “Anatomy of a Fall” — along with award season’s favorite pooch, Messi — are coming to Hulu on Friday, March 22. The French courtroom drama stars Sandra Hüller as a wife accused of murdering her husband (Samuel Theis) by pushing him out a high window in the French Alps chalet. The film effectively puts their marriage on trial while offering Hüller an engrossing platform for all her cunning as a performer. “Anatomy of a Fall” won the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival and best original screenplay at the Academy Awards. In her review, AP Film Writer Lindsey Bahr called it “a smartly constructed and wholly engaging whodunit, courtroom thriller, marriage drama and, at some points, satire.”
— Doug Liman gives the 1989 cult classic “Road House” a pulpy modern spin with Jake Gyllenhaal as a former UFC fighter hired as security for a seedy Florida Keys bar. Jessica Williams plays the owner of a road house under siege from a crime syndicate that eventually brings in even more muscle, and a dose of mania, in a fearsome fixer played by mixed-martial-arts fighter Conor McGregor. Though Liman, the director of “Edge of Tomorrow” and “Swingers,” has pleaded for the film to be theatrically released, “Road House” debuts Thursday on Prime Video.
– Paul Simon gets an expansive two-part documentary with “In Restless Dreams: The Music of Paul Simon,” from filmmaker Alex Gibney. After the first half premiered March 17 on MGM+, part two lands on Sunday, March 24. “In Restless Dreams,” which premiered last fall at the Toronto International Film Festival, surveys the varied chapters of Simon’s career, including his many years as a duo with Art Garfunkel, the recording of his 1986 album “Graceland” and the still unfolding, and music-making, life of the 82-year-old songwriter.
— AP Film Writer Jake Coyle
— Shakira returns with her first new album in seven years, “Las Mujeres Ya No Lloran” (“Women don’t cry anymore” in English, a lyric lifted from her smash hit “Music Sessions Vol. 53” with Argentine producer Bizarrap). It’s also her first full-length release since her split from soccer star Gerard Piqué — a pop album transformed by pain. “While writing each song I was rebuilding myself,” the Colombian musician said in a statement. “While singing them, my tears transformed into diamonds, and my vulnerability into strength.” Seven of the album’s 16 tracks have been previously released — including “TQG” with Karol G (also featured on Karol G’s “Mañana Será Bonito” album, one of AP’s picks for the best of 2023 ), “Te Felicito” with reggaetonero Rauw Alejandro, “Copa Vacía” with Manuel Turizo and more. “Las Mujeres Ya No Lloran” is the sound of reclamation for Shakira — and an addictive listen.
— There are eras to Waxahatchee, the musical moniker of Katie Crutchfield. Her story begins in the D.I.Y. power pop-punk of her band P.S. Eliot, the nihilism of early Waxahatchee records like “American Weekend,” and then, the current moment: “Tigers Blood,” a hell of a lot more country than her earlier releases, with the wisdom that came with sobriety and a move to St. Louis (that’s heard on her last album, 2020’s “Saint Cloud” and certainly now). There’s a lot to love here, like the acoustic ballad “365” and the Americana-flavored “Bored.” There’s also MJ Lenderman of the Asheville, North Carolina, indie rock band Wednesday, a new collaborator. It’s hard not to cozy up to the warmth of their harmonies on “Right Back to It,” a song — like many on this album — that celebrates the privilege of certain romantic mundanities, like settling into a long-term relationship.
— A debut album is an introduction. A sophomore release can be a make-or-break moment: Who is this person as an artist, what do they have to say, and are we still listening? Enter Fletcher, the queer pop powerhouse signed to Capitol Records who first broke out with the 2019 viral hit “Undrunk.” On “In Search of the Antidote,” she builds off the success of her earlier singles — still concerned with love and failed relationships, now through a matured lens.
— Gossip, the dance-punk band that gave the world Beth Ditto, is preparing to release their first new album in 12 years — and their first since they broke up shortly thereafter. It’s a return to their powers, now funkier than ever. At least, that’s obvious on the disco-informed title track, “Real Power.” Another new single, “Crazy Again,” is all palm-muted power chords and reserved synths. Indie sleaze revivalists, it is time to break out the neon.
— AP Music Writer Maria Sherman
— In a new special, James Beard-winning chef and restaurateur Jose Andrés invites actors Jamie Lee Curtis, Bryan Cranston and O’Shea Jackson Jr. over for dinner — but first they have to help him cook. The goal of the night isn’t perfection but to have fun. “Dinner Party Diaries with Jose Andrés” drops Tuesday on Prime Video. In an interview with The Associated Press, Andrés says he hopes the special brings awareness and donations to his nonprofit, World Central Kitchen, which delivers meals to people in disaster areas.
— A new Apple TV+ series called “Palm Royale” is bursting with big-name talent. Set in Palm Beach in 1969, Kristen Wiig plays Maxine, a woman desperate to be accepted into high society and a private club called the Palm Royale. At the beginning of the first episode, we see Maxine climb over a wall to get inside her coveted club. The cast includes Carol Burnett, Ricky Martin, Laura Dern, Allison Janney, Josh Lucas, Leslie Bibb, Kaia Gerber, Amber Chardae Robinson and Mindy Cohn. The show drops Wednesday.
— “Law & Order” creator Dick Wolf is dipping into the true crime world with a new docuseries on Netflix. “Homicide: New York” debuts Wednesday and features detectives, police officers and prosecutors recalling some of their most memorable murder cases. “Homicide: Los Angeles” is already scheduled to air on the streamer later this year.
— Diarra Kilpatrick created and stars in a mystery comedy for BET+ called “Diarra from Detroit.” It’s about a woman who has a great first date with a man she meets on Tinder. When she doesn’t hear from him again, Diarra concludes the only logical explanation is that he was kidnapped, so she launches an investigation. “Diarra from Detroit” premieres Thursday on BET+.
— Alicia Rancilio
— Princess Peach has been around for almost 40 years, but she’s usually stuck playing second fiddle to that bozo Mario. Princess Peach: Showtime! puts Nintendo’s sweetheart center stage, as she tries to save a struggling theater from a villain named Grape who’s way more into tragedy than comedy. Saving the show requires our heroine to make plenty of costume changes, so get ready for Cowgirl Peach, Detective Peach, Ninja Peach, Mermaid Peach and more. She’s not just playing dress-up — each outfit gives the princess different skills she’ll need to negotiate a constantly changing stage set. The curtain rises Friday, March 22, on Nintendo Switch.
— Dragon’s Dogma got decent reviews when it came out in 2012, and it has developed a cult audience over the years. In the meantime, its genre — let’s say “high-fantasy hack-and-slash role-playing” — has exploded with monster hits like Elden Ring. So at long last, Capcom is delivering Dragon’s Dogma II. You create your character, the “Arisen,” from scratch, building on typical RPG species like humans, elves and “beastrens” and jobs like warrior, archer and sorcerer. As you explore two sprawling kingdoms, you can recruit AI-controlled “pawns” to help complete your mission, which is to ”slay the Dragon and claim the throne.” If this sounds irresistible (you know who you are), the quest begins Friday, March 22, on PlayStation 5, Xbox X/S or PC.
— Lou Kesten
___
Catch up on AP’s entertainment coverage here: https://apnews.com/entertainment.
Chef and restaurateur Jose Andrés inviting actors Jamie Lee Curtis, Bryan Cranston and O’Shea Jackson Jr. over for dinner in a new TV special and Jake Gyllenhaal starring in an update of the pulpy cult classic “Road House” are some of the new television, movies, music and games headed to a device near you.
Also among the streaming offerings worth your time as selected by The Associated Press’ entertainment journalists: Shakira releases her first album in seven years, Paul Simon gets an expansive two-part documentary on MGM+ and a Nintendo sweetheart takes center stage in the game Princess Peach: Showtime!
— Fresh off its Oscar success, Justine Triet’s “Anatomy of a Fall” — along with award season’s favorite pooch, Messi — are coming to Hulu on Friday, March 22. The French courtroom drama stars Sandra Hüller as a wife accused of murdering her husband (Samuel Theis) by pushing him out a high window in the French Alps chalet. The film effectively puts their marriage on trial while offering Hüller an engrossing platform for all her cunning as a performer. “Anatomy of a Fall” won the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival and best original screenplay at the Academy Awards. In her review, AP Film Writer Lindsey Bahr called it “a smartly constructed and wholly engaging whodunit, courtroom thriller, marriage drama and, at some points, satire.”
— Doug Liman gives the 1989 cult classic “Road House” a pulpy modern spin with Jake Gyllenhaal as a former UFC fighter hired as security for a seedy Florida Keys bar. Jessica Williams plays the owner of a road house under siege from a crime syndicate that eventually brings in even more muscle, and a dose of mania, in a fearsome fixer played by mixed-martial-arts fighter Conor McGregor. Though Liman, the director of “Edge of Tomorrow” and “Swingers,” has pleaded for the film to be theatrically released, “Road House” debuts Thursday on Prime Video.
– Paul Simon gets an expansive two-part documentary with “In Restless Dreams: The Music of Paul Simon,” from filmmaker Alex Gibney. After the first half premiered March 17 on MGM+, part two lands on Sunday, March 24. “In Restless Dreams,” which premiered last fall at the Toronto International Film Festival, surveys the varied chapters of Simon’s career, including his many years as a duo with Art Garfunkel, the recording of his 1986 album “Graceland” and the still unfolding, and music-making, life of the 82-year-old songwriter.
— AP Film Writer Jake Coyle
— Shakira returns with her first new album in seven years, “Las Mujeres Ya No Lloran” (“Women don’t cry anymore” in English, a lyric lifted from her smash hit “Music Sessions Vol. 53” with Argentine producer Bizarrap). It’s also her first full-length release since her split from soccer star Gerard Piqué — a pop album transformed by pain. “While writing each song I was rebuilding myself,” the Colombian musician said in a statement. “While singing them, my tears transformed into diamonds, and my vulnerability into strength.” Seven of the album’s 16 tracks have been previously released — including “TQG” with Karol G (also featured on Karol G’s “Mañana Será Bonito” album, one of AP’s picks for the best of 2023 ), “Te Felicito” with reggaetonero Rauw Alejandro, “Copa Vacía” with Manuel Turizo and more. “Las Mujeres Ya No Lloran” is the sound of reclamation for Shakira — and an addictive listen.
— There are eras to Waxahatchee, the musical moniker of Katie Crutchfield. Her story begins in the D.I.Y. power pop-punk of her band P.S. Eliot, the nihilism of early Waxahatchee records like “American Weekend,” and then, the current moment: “Tigers Blood,” a hell of a lot more country than her earlier releases, with the wisdom that came with sobriety and a move to St. Louis (that’s heard on her last album, 2020’s “Saint Cloud” and certainly now). There’s a lot to love here, like the acoustic ballad “365” and the Americana-flavored “Bored.” There’s also MJ Lenderman of the Asheville, North Carolina, indie rock band Wednesday, a new collaborator. It’s hard not to cozy up to the warmth of their harmonies on “Right Back to It,” a song — like many on this album — that celebrates the privilege of certain romantic mundanities, like settling into a long-term relationship.
— A debut album is an introduction. A sophomore release can be a make-or-break moment: Who is this person as an artist, what do they have to say, and are we still listening? Enter Fletcher, the queer pop powerhouse signed to Capitol Records who first broke out with the 2019 viral hit “Undrunk.” On “In Search of the Antidote,” she builds off the success of her earlier singles — still concerned with love and failed relationships, now through a matured lens.
— Gossip, the dance-punk band that gave the world Beth Ditto, is preparing to release their first new album in 12 years — and their first since they broke up shortly thereafter. It’s a return to their powers, now funkier than ever. At least, that’s obvious on the disco-informed title track, “Real Power.” Another new single, “Crazy Again,” is all palm-muted power chords and reserved synths. Indie sleaze revivalists, it is time to break out the neon.
— AP Music Writer Maria Sherman
— In a new special, James Beard-winning chef and restaurateur Jose Andrés invites actors Jamie Lee Curtis, Bryan Cranston and O’Shea Jackson Jr. over for dinner — but first they have to help him cook. The goal of the night isn’t perfection but to have fun. “Dinner Party Diaries with Jose Andrés” drops Tuesday on Prime Video. In an interview with The Associated Press, Andrés says he hopes the special brings awareness and donations to his nonprofit, World Central Kitchen, which delivers meals to people in disaster areas.
— A new Apple TV+ series called “Palm Royale” is bursting with big-name talent. Set in Palm Beach in 1969, Kristen Wiig plays Maxine, a woman desperate to be accepted into high society and a private club called the Palm Royale. At the beginning of the first episode, we see Maxine climb over a wall to get inside her coveted club. The cast includes Carol Burnett, Ricky Martin, Laura Dern, Allison Janney, Josh Lucas, Leslie Bibb, Kaia Gerber, Amber Chardae Robinson and Mindy Cohn. The show drops Wednesday.
— “Law & Order” creator Dick Wolf is dipping into the true crime world with a new docuseries on Netflix. “Homicide: New York” debuts Wednesday and features detectives, police officers and prosecutors recalling some of their most memorable murder cases. “Homicide: Los Angeles” is already scheduled to air on the streamer later this year.
— Diarra Kilpatrick created and stars in a mystery comedy for BET+ called “Diarra from Detroit.” It’s about a woman who has a great first date with a man she meets on Tinder. When she doesn’t hear from him again, Diarra concludes the only logical explanation is that he was kidnapped, so she launches an investigation. “Diarra from Detroit” premieres Thursday on BET+.
— Alicia Rancilio
— Princess Peach has been around for almost 40 years, but she’s usually stuck playing second fiddle to that bozo Mario. Princess Peach: Showtime! puts Nintendo’s sweetheart center stage, as she tries to save a struggling theater from a villain named Grape who’s way more into tragedy than comedy. Saving the show requires our heroine to make plenty of costume changes, so get ready for Cowgirl Peach, Detective Peach, Ninja Peach, Mermaid Peach and more. She’s not just playing dress-up — each outfit gives the princess different skills she’ll need to negotiate a constantly changing stage set. The curtain rises Friday, March 22, on Nintendo Switch.
— Dragon’s Dogma got decent reviews when it came out in 2012, and it has developed a cult audience over the years. In the meantime, its genre — let’s say “high-fantasy hack-and-slash role-playing” — has exploded with monster hits like Elden Ring. So at long last, Capcom is delivering Dragon’s Dogma II. You create your character, the “Arisen,” from scratch, building on typical RPG species like humans, elves and “beastrens” and jobs like warrior, archer and sorcerer. As you explore two sprawling kingdoms, you can recruit AI-controlled “pawns” to help complete your mission, which is to ”slay the Dragon and claim the throne.” If this sounds irresistible (you know who you are), the quest begins Friday, March 22, on PlayStation 5, Xbox X/S or PC.
— Lou Kesten
___
Catch up on AP’s entertainment coverage here: https://apnews.com/entertainment.
