THE 25 CANNES FILMS BOUND TO REKINDLE CINEMA’S FLAME 

Dossier coordinated by Juliette Reitzer and TiméZoppé, with Léa André-Sarreau, Quentin Grosset and Joséphine Leroy 

ANATOMY OF A FALL (ANATOMIE D’UNE CHUTE) by Justine Triet 
Official Selection – Competition 

Complex heroines enmeshed in labyrinthine psychological turmoil. This is what Justine Triet has accustomed us to, back in competition four years after Sybil with this film co-written with Arthur Harari, director of the captivating Onoda. A thriller that leads us in the footsteps of a woman under investigation following the death of her husband: the detective first suspects an accident or suicide, but ends up believing it is murder. The key witness turns out to be the couple’s blind son, who is faced with a moral dilemma... The cast includes Swann Arlaud, Sandra Hüller, Antoine Reinartz and Jehnny Beth – a handsome line-up of actors, whose more whimsical ways will doubtlessly be revealed by the director.

MAY DECEMBER by Todd Haynes 

Official Selection – Competition 

This is THE project we’ve been waiting for for years. After his portrait of The Velvet Underground (with its soberly eponymous title), presented out of competition at Cannes in 2021, the great Todd Haynes is back in competition with this drama about an actress (Julianne Moore) whose family life is disrupted by the biopic being made about her, and her encounter with the actress who is about to play her (Natalie Portman). All this is interwoven with the story of the couple she forms with her husband, 23 years her junior, which had made tabloid press headlines years earlier. A mishmash that promises to be vertiginously enthralling – as ever with the director of Carol (2016). 

 AMA GLORIA by Marie Amachoukeli 

International Critic’s Week – Special Screening 

She has been a regular at Cannes since presenting her short It’s Free for Girls (co-directed with Claire Burger) at the International Critic’s Week in 2009, and notably with Party Girl (co-directed with Samuel Theis and Claire Burger), awarded the Caméra d’Or in 2014. Marie Amachoukeli returns this time as a solo director to open the week with a film about childhood, which promises to be intense. Ama Gloria tells the story of Cléo, just 6 years old, who absolutely adores her nanny, Gloria, but Gloria has to go home to Cape Verde to be with her own children. Cléo pleads with her to promise to see her again as soon as possible. Gloria invites the little girl to join her family on her island to spend one last summer together. Have your tissues ready. 

THE NATURE OF LOVE (SIMPLE COMME SYLVAIN) by Monia Chokri 

Official Selection – Un Certain Regard. 

 “I wanted to write a real romance. It seems to me there are very few of them, perhaps because we’re living in a cynical era,” the Quebec director had confided to us at the time of the release of Babysitter (2022), regarding her new project, being shot at the time. Presented four years after A Brother’s Love won the Un Certain Regard jury’s Coup de Coeur award, The Nature of Love tells the story of a well-to-do forty-year-old woman (Magalie Lépine-Blondeau), who is bowled over by her encounter with an entrepreneur from a modest background (Pierre-Yves Cardinal, seen in Xavier Dolan’s Tom at the Farm). We’re counting on the vivacious filmmaker to make our little hearts flutter. 

THE ZONE OF INTEREST by Jonathan Glazer 

Official Selection – Competition 

British director Jonathan Glazer is as rare as he is precious. In more than twenty years he has directed only four films – and they are, quite simply, all masterpieces. None of them – neither Under the Skin (2014), with Scarlett Johansson as a fascinating alien who discovers human emotions, nor Birth (2004), a disturbing melodrama about mourning – has been presented at Cannes. This injustice is now put right with The Zone of Interest, which follows an SS officer who falls in love with the wife of his camp commandant during World War II. As the secret romance begins, the spurned husband suspects his wife, and has her followed. The prodigiously talented actor Sandra Hüller (Toni Erdmann) is on board.  

THE OTHER LAURENS (L’AUTRE LAURENS) by Claude Schmitz 

Directors’ Fortnight 

We loved his medium-length film in the form of an off-beat news story, Carwash (2019), and last February, Lucie Loses Her Horse, a film about chivalry and shining armour in a woman’s world. The intriguing pitch of his latest work is hardly going to disappoint. “Private detective Gabriel Laurens, specializing in marital affairs, sees his life turned upside down when his niece Jade arrives at his home. The young girl has doubts about the accidental death of her father, and asks him to investigate.” We feel a kind of weirdo Inspector Gadget coming on, portrayed by the excellent Olivier Rabourdin, and a crime that we guess is a pretext for a fine comedy of manners. In short, a big thumbs-up. 

CLUB ZERO by Jessica Hausner 

Official Selection – Competition 

After Little Joe, presented in Competition in 2019, the Austrian Jessica Hausner continues her meteoric ascent with a second English-language film. The Australian-Polish Mia Wasikowska plays the role of a teacher in a private high school who launches a nutrition course with an innovative concept, shaking up eating habits. Without raising the suspicions of teachers or parents, some students fall under her influence and join the very closed circle of the mysterious Club Zero. Sidse Babett Knudsen, Amir El-Masry, Elsa Zylberstein and Mathieu Demy complete the cast of this psychological thriller that has a whiff of the intoxicating and the deliciously formalist. 

ON THE EDGE (ÉTAT LIMITE) by Nicolas Peduzzi 

ACID 

Nicolas Peduzzi blew us away in 2021 with Ghost Song, a stormy crossing of Houston, between documentary and fiction, following the itineraries of two musicians. We hope to find that magnitude and lyricism of his again with a project that is different, to say the least: here, the filmmaker ventures a little closer to home, to the Beaujon public hospital in Clichy. There, he filmed the psychiatric department, where there is only one psychiatrist left, Dr. Jamal Abdel-Kader, who resists, despite the lack of resources and the insistence on optimal productivity currently gaining ground in the care sector. We can certainly count on Peduzzi to point his camera where it hurts. 

FIREBRAND by Karim Aïnouz 

Official Selection – Competition 

After his dark, oddball Madame Satã (selected for Un Certain Regard in 2002), and The Invisible Life of Eurídice Gusmão (awarded the Un Certain Regard prize in 2019), a melodrama about the marital disillusionment of two sisters in Rio de Janeiro, the Brazilian director is making his first appearance in the Official Competition with an historical drama about Catherine Parr, the sixth and last wife of King Henry VIII of England and Ireland– and one of the few to survive him. It promises blood, rivalry and cruel intrigue, all wrapped up in polished cinematography, and interpreted by the disconcerting Alicia Vikander and Jude Law. 

YOUTH (QING CHUN) by Wang Bing 

Official Selection – Competition 

The Chinese director, a great depicter of his country and its geographical changes, has accustomed us to long documentary frescoes (Coal Money, ’Til Madness Do Us Part, Dead Souls). Everything suggests that the same is true of this three-and-a-half-hour documentary set in Zhili, 150 kilometers from Shanghai. In this city dedicated to textile manufacturing, 20-year-olds flock from rural areas and work tirelessly to raise a child, buy a house or set up their own workshop. One can expect a captivating, eye-opening fresco. A winning double bill this year for Wang Bing, who is also presenting the more modest and arty Man in Black at a Special Screening. 

THE BOOK OF SOLUTIONS (LE LIVRE DES SOLUTIONS) by Michel Gondry 

Directors’ Fortnight

A somewhat rare sight at the Croisette – the last time he was here was in 2012, already in the Directors’ Fortnight, for The We and the I, about the blazing summer of high school students in the Bronx. The French filmmaker is now presentingThe Book of Solutions, a very personal project shot in the Cévennes region of France, where he has family ties. Pierre Niney plays a director trying to overcome the demons that hinder his creativity: a highly meta subject for a filmmaker who is both a film buff and very into the obsessive struggle with the blank page. This inspired mélange is enhanced by a delectable cast: Blanche Gardin, Camille Rutherford, Vincent Elbaz and Françoise Lebrun. 

FOUR DAUGHTERS (LES FILLES D’OLFA) by Kaouther Ben Hania 

Official Selection – Competition 

Resolutely feminist, the cinema of Kaouther Ben Hania always manages to take us by surprise. In the comedy Challat of Tunis (ACID, 2014) and the thriller Beauty and the Dogs (Un Certain Regard, 2017) the Tunisian filmmaker led the viewer down a number of side tracks. This new vintage, which opens the doors of the Competition to her for the first time, starts with the tragedy of a mother whose two older daughters suddenly disappear. The director then summons professional actresses and sets up an unusual filmic strategy to lift the veil on this story. Suffice it to say that we are very intrigued by this surprising pitch. 

ANIMAL KINGDOM (LE RÈGNE ANIMAL) by Thomas Cailley 

Official Selection – Competition 

After the very promising Love at First Sight (Directors’ Fortnight, 2014), Frenchman Thomas Cailley returns to Cannes with a much-anticipated feature film starring Adèle Exarchopoulos, Romain Duris and Paul Kircher (introduced in Christophe Honoré’s Winter Boy). The story is set “in a world plagued by a wave of mutations that gradually transform some humans into animals.” A man does everything to save his wife, who is affected by this mysterious evil, and takes his 16-year-old son on a quest. When asked her to tell us more in an interview, Adèle Exarchopoulos spoke of a “completely crazy scenario”. Is Cannes ready for such a shock wave?

ASTEROID CITY by Wes Anderson 

Official Selection – Competition 

After The French Dispatch (2021) and Moonrise Kingdom (2012), both of which were left without any award, Wes Anderson is trying his luck in the Competition again, with this retro comedy that plunges us into the fictional small town of Asteroid City in the middle of the American desert during the fifties, while a scientific convention of apprentice astronomers faces mysterious events. Featuring Jason Schwartzman, Scarlett Johansson, Tom Hanks, Tilda Swinton, Bryan Cranston, Ed Norton, Adrien Brody, Liev Schreiber, Steve Carell, Willem Dafoe and Margot Robbie … let’s leave it at that. The cast is as endless as it is enticing.  

LA CHIMERA by Alice Rohrwacher

Official Selection – Competition 

After Happy as Lazzaro, a surreal fable in an Italy haunted by the brutality of the post-fascist rural exodus (presented in the 2018 Competition), the Tuscan director is back, with La Chimera. The story, set in the 1980s, is of a hunter of Etruscan relics returned to the coast of the Tyrrhenian Sea to practice his illegal activity with bandits, and who feels the void left by the memory of his lost love. The director of The Wonders (in Competition in 2014) can be relied on to poetically explore the boundaries between reality and fantasy, and the stories one tells oneself to survive the loss of a loved one. 

A PRINCE (UN PRINCE) by Pierre Creton 

Director’s Fortnight

In his native Pays de Caux, Normandy, Pierre Creton has created a singular filmography, empathetic but not maudlin (Go, Toto!2017; A Beautiful summer, 2019), which blurs the lines between documentary and fiction. The man, who is both a farm worker and visual artist, gives a very poetic view of a completely overlooked world – his own. In A Prince he tells the story of Pierre-Joseph, from his adolescence spent in a training center to become a gardener, to his meeting with the owner of a strange chateau years later. We will readily let ourselves be surprised by this new piece, which we can already guess to be bizarrely beautiful. 

KILLERS OF THE FLOWER MOON by Martin Scorsese 

Official Selection – Competition 

The director is returning to the Croisette with a thriller produced by Apple, co-written with Eric Roth. This western, with a stellar cast (Leonardo DiCaprio, Robert De Niro, Brendan Fraser, Lily Gladstone), is set in 1920s Oklahoma, and follows a series of murders committed by rancher William Hale and his nephews in order to take over the Osage reservation on which oil springs have been discovered. A series of horrendous acts, known today as the “Reign of Terror” ... A strong return for Scorsese, who hadn’t been in the official selection since After Hours in 1986, when he won the Best Director Award. 

 ACID (ACIDE) by Just Philippot 

Official Selection – Competition 

We are delighted to see the young Frenchman Just Philippot, who had captivated us in 2020 with The Swarm (Critics’ Week), a high-quality genre film, an agricultural thriller in which a swarm of killer locusts threatens a livestock farmer suffering from burnout. He is featured in the Special Screening selection with Acid, an extension of one of his own short films about a climatic catastrophe – acid rain falling on France – with Laetitia Dosch and Guillaume Canet. We have a hunch that this apocalyptic exodus will breathe some environmental awareness back into the official selection.

OCCUPIED CITY by Steve McQueen

Official Selection – Competition 

The gifted and politically committed British director Steve McQueen, who presented Hunger at Cannes in 2008, will show his first documentary, adapted from the book Atlas of an Occupied City: Amsterdam 1940-1945 by his wife, historian Bianca Stigter, in a special screening. The book looks at World War II in Amsterdam, examining how traces and memories still shape the lives of its residents today – notably Stigter’s. This isn’t the first time the couple have worked together: Stigter was the associate producer of 12 Years a Slave (2014) and The Widows (2018), directed by McQueen. 

CONANN by Bertrand Mandico 

Directors’ Fortnight

After his tortuous, slimy feature film After Blue (Dirty Paradise) (2021), Bertrand Mandico is back with a variation that promises to be excessive, feminist and romantic, based on the famous virile, muscle-bound character of Conan the Barbarian, dreamed up by Robert E. Howard and once portrayed on film by Arnold Schwarzenegger. In 2020 the filmmaker told us: “In my project, Conan is a girl, or girls, a woman, or women, and they evolve in a female world [...] There will be six Conanns, as many as there are periods in their life. Each new Conann will kill the previous one because, for me, the ultimate barbarism is to kill one’s youth.” Quite a program. 

ALONG CAME LOVE (LE TEMPS D’AIMER) by Katell Quillévéré 

Official Selection – Cannes Première

After Love Like Poison (Directors’ Fortnight, 2010) and Suzanne (Critics’ Week, 2013), Katell Quillévéré has made it to the Official Selection. Along came love follows the meeting, in 1947, of Madeleine (Anaïs Demoustier), a waitress in a hotel-restaurant and mother of a little boy, and François (Vincent Lacoste), a wealthy, cultured student. The chemistry between Anaïs Demoustier and Vincent Lacoste has been proven – they played opposite each other in Félix Moati’s Father and Sons and Quentin Dupieux’s Smoking Causes Coughing– and we can count on the director’s talent to observe the dangers of passion. 

PICTURES OF GHOSTS (RETRATOS FANTASMAS) by Kleber Mendonça Filho 

Official Selection – Special Screening

Winner of the 2019 Cannes Jury Prize for Bacurau, a bloody, dystopian fable about the death of an iconic 94-year-old matriarch in a fictional, isolated village in the heart of the Sertão, the Brazilian director is selected this time in the Special Screening selection with this documentary about downtown Recife. Kleber Mendonça Filho’s hometown, the Northeast Brazilian town was already at the heart of Neighbouring Sounds (2014), his first feature-length film, and Aquarius (2016), a sublime chronicle of the life of an indomitable 60-year-old woman, which had been selected in Competition. 

KUBI by Takeshi Kitano 

Official Selection – Cannes Première

The great Takeshi Kitano hadn’t featured in the Official Selection of the Cannes Festival since The Outrage (2010). Thirteen years later he is back, with the adaptation of one of his books. What is announced as possibly his last film will be a historical epic set in 1582: in a temple in Kyoto, the warlord Oda Nobunaga has been murdered. A general who is suspected of being disloyal is captured just before the assassination. Nobunaga wanted to break his neck... With this story of politics and gory dirty tricks, has Kitano, said to have mellowed too much, retrieved his bad-boy nature? 

THE GOLDMAN CASE (LE PROCÈS GOLDMAN) by Cédric Kahn 

Directors’ Fortnight

Kahn in Cannes already sounds obvious. But what really earns the actor-filmmaker his place in the selection is his way of drawing intense portraits of outsiders, of tormented individuals (Roberto Succo, presented in Competition in 2001, and The Prayer, 2018). He returns this year with a biopic devoted to Pierre Goldman, half-brother of the singer Jean-Jacques, but above all an ardent left-wing activist, sentenced to life imprisonment in December 1972 for armed robberies that led to the deaths of two pharmacists. It was a trial that would make him famous, both among the intellectual left and the media (because of his outbursts); this before his sad end: his death by assassination in 1979. 

HYPNOTIC by Robert Rodriguez 

Official Selection – Midnight Screening

A tad more discreet than his sidekick Quentin Tarantino (among other mad collaborations, they co-wrote the Grindhouse diptych in 2007), Robert Rodriguez had already set the Croisette on fire in 2005 with his cult Sin City, his gang of criminals, dirty cops and femme fatales. Like his night owl heroes, the American filmmaker, screenwriter and musician is landing this year at the Midnight Screening to tell the story of a detective (Ben Affleck) investigating a series of robberies, who finds himself caught up in a case involving his missing daughter and a secret government program. We hope that neither Didier Raoult nor Francis Lalanne are in the script. 

The opening ceremony of the Cannes Film Festival will be broadcast live on May 16 at the mk2 Odéon (Côté St Germain), mk2 Nation and mk2 Bibliothèque at 7 pm, followed by the screening of the opening film of the Festival, Jeanne du Barry by Maïwenn, at 8 pm