Parade of stars, including Mads Mikkelsen and Tom Cruise, cult directors like David Cronenberg or James Gray: the Cannes Film Festival will open its 75th edition next Tuesday, where the cream of world cinema will throng, with the war in Ukraine as its backdrop. bottom. After an edition under the July sun last year, due to the Covid-19 pandemic, festival-goers thus find the month of May, and without health restrictions for the first time since the start of the pandemic.
Tom Cruise therefore, for the new Top Gun, Idriss Elba and Tilda Swinton at George Miller, Léa Seydoux and Viggo Mortensen at David Cronenberg, or the promising Austin Butler who embodies the “King” in a biopic of Elvis Presley signed Baz
Luhrman: the red carpet awaits its share of stars. The American actor Forest Whitaker will also be present, to receive an honorary palme d’or.
Actress Virginie Efira (in the credits of Revoir Paris, a film presented out of competition which addresses the painful memory of the terrorist attacks in the French capital) will host the opening ceremony on Tuesday evening. Then it’s time for the cinema with Cut!, bloody parody of zombie comedy and ode to cinema made with a lot of love and bits of string by Michel Hazanavicius – the king of Oscar-winning pastiche for The Artist.
On the competition side, 21 films are in the running to succeed Titane, the gore and uncompromising golden palm of French filmmaker Julia Ducournau, the second crowned director in the history of the Cannes Film Festival. When the jury and parallel sections are now tending towards parity, the competition still only offers a limited place to female directors: five are in the running, including Claire Denis who finds Robert Pattinson for Stars at Noon. As for the filmmakers expected on the Croisette, they are between 30 and 84 years old. Among them are David Cronenberg, who once once more promises to shake audiences with Crimes of the Future, and James Gray, who will present Armageddon Time – a film set in 1980s New York on the rise of the Trump family.
Several already crowned directors are in the running: the Belgian brothers Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne with Tori and Lokita, the grittiest of Swedish filmmakers Ruben Östlund with Triangle of Sadness, the Japanese Hirokazu Kore-eda, who shot Broker with the southern star -Korean Song Kang-ho, and Romanian Cristian Mungiu with his film RMN.
Serebrennikov libre
Beyond the competition, still not open to platforms, fans and moviegoers alike should enjoy dozens of highly anticipated works: George Miller’s new film, Three thousand years waiting for you, with Idriss Elba and Tilda Swinton, the return of Marco Bellocchio to his lead years in Italy, the Spanish thriller ace Rodrigo Sorogoyen or the passages to the direction of Lee Jung-jae and Jesse Eisenberg. On the French side, Léa Seydoux, Louis Garrel or Sandrine Kiberlain will climb the steps several times.
This whole program will have the war in Ukraine as a backdrop, inevitably “in everyone’s mind”, underlined Thierry Frémaux, the general delegate of the Cannes Film Festival. Two generations of Ukrainian filmmakers will be present, with the regular Sergei Loznitsa for The Natural History of Destruction, on the destruction of German cities by the Allies during the Second World War, but also the young Maksim Nakonechnyi for Bachennya Metelyka (in category One certain look). Cannes should welcome for the first time on its steps Kirill Serebrennikov, who has become a symbol of Russian artists breaking with the regime since he was able to join Europe legally following the outbreak of the war. The director had not been able to leave his country for his previous films in competition, Leto and Petrov’s fever, but is now free to come and defend Tchaikovsky’s wife, the first film screened in competition. The title of the closing film is not yet known.
And, a sign that everything has not yet returned to the way it was before on the cinema planet, it was only three weeks before its opening that the Cannes Film Festival finally succeeded in constituting the jury, chaired by the French actor Vincent Lindon. He takes over from American director Spike Lee. At his side, the Anglo-American actress and director Rebecca Hall, the Swedish Noomi Rapace or the directors Asghar Farhadi, Ladj Ly and Joachim Trier.
François BECKER / AFP
Parade of stars, including Mads Mikkelsen and Tom Cruise, cult directors like David Cronenberg or James Gray: the Cannes Film Festival will open its 75th edition next Tuesday, where the cream of world cinema will throng, with the war in Ukraine as its backdrop. bottom. After an edition under the July sun last year, due to the Covid-19 pandemic, festival-goers…
