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Aug 28, 2008 1:56 PM CST |
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It hasn't even started, but rumors have already begun. The Cannes Festival, as it is now called, the biggest and the best film festival in the world, opens Wednesday, May 11. The twenty films which are selected for the official competition have been known for some time. The hot tickets include the new film by Lars von Trier—the second part of his “American” trilogy, Manderlay. The film is without its original star, Nicole Kidman, who appeared in von Trier's Dogville, but then had a falling-out with von Trier. Major American independents have a presence in Cannes. Jim Jarmusch will premiere his new film, Broken Flowers, in which a single guy played by Bill Murray goes across country to find all his old lovers to try to find the mother of his newly-discovered son. Gus Van Sant's new film uses the improvisational structure of his “Elephant” in a new film called Last Days which tries to recast the last days of singer Kurt Cobain. Handicapping the winner has already started. An analysis of previous years' winners forms the substance of the theory that the likely winners are programmed in the second week of the Festival, rather than the first. According to the theory, because it plays later in the festival, The Child, the new film by the very talented Belgian brothers Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne, who surprised the Festival a few years ago by coming out of the left field to win for their film Rosetta, has a greater chance than, say, Where the Truth Lies, the new Canadian film by Atom Egoyan which screens at Cannes on Friday the thirteenth. The opening night film is Lemming, directed by Dominik Moll. The Cannes Festival showed his first feature, With a Friend Like Harry—a tight suspense-thriller about a do-gooder guy named Harry who gradually destroys a family. Lemming is also a thriller which plunges a young couple who have recently moved into a new town, into what Moll calls “an eruption of the irrational.” The feature film jury this year is headed by Emir Kusturica. This has been the source of some controversy because Kusturica's Cannes-award-wining film Underground, was the source of considerable debate in France. Underground was accused of apologizing for Serbia's actions during the war in Bosnia. Kusturica has not helped the wounds heal by coming off as arrogant and combative. He is joined on the jury by American writer Toni Morrison, Indian actress Nandita Das, and American actress Salma Hayek—who, interestingly, is credited in the official festival press kit as being from Mexico. French New Wave filmmaker Agnes Varda is one of the film directors on the jury along with action filmmaker John Woo and German director Faith Akin, the director of the Berlin Festival winner Head On. Thierry Fremaux, the chief programmer at Cannes, says that this year the selection committee saw 1,540 films from ninety-seven different countries. This was winnowed down to fifty-three films—the twenty which play in competition, and the rest in the runner-up section of the festival called “Un Certain Regard.” Fifty of these are world premieres. Among the directors who are perennial Cannes favorites and who return with films this year are David Cronenberg with his film A History of Violence, Taiwanese filmmaker Hou Hsiao Hsen, with his Three Times, Israeli filmmaker Amos Gitai with Free Zone, and Austrian Michael Haneke, whose film Cache is really a French production. The seeming odd choices of films for the competition seem to be the first film of Tommy Lee Jones, The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada, and Robert Rodriguez and Frank Miller's Sin City. The premiere of the new George Lucas film, Star Wars&mdashl;Episode III—Revenge of the Sith, has been moved to a special out-of-competition screening as has the new film by Woody Allen, Match Point. The political film at Cannes last year was Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11. This year British filmmaker Adam Curtis has condensed his three-part television special about the neo-cons' rise in dominating the global stage, The Power of Nightmares, into a single documentary feature. Another condensation is a special screening of Jean-Luc Godard's Moments Chosen from the Histories of teh Cinema, a feature edited from Godard's massive, brilliant, and challenging ten-hour series, Histoires du Cinema. But that's all only the tip of the iceberg. By one estimate, over 900 films will screen at Cannes—not including all of the added-on private screenings. This is Milos Stehlik for Chicago Public Radio’s Worldview. Worldview film contributor Milos Stehlik is the director of Facets Multimedia. |
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