Festivals & Events
Festivals & Events
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Cannes 2025: Awards, Young Mothers, Sentimental Value, Resurrection
The cinema world was quick to juxtapose an image from the climax of this year’s award ceremony—where Iranian director Jafar Panahi took home the Palme d’Or for his generously-received It Was Just an Accident—alongside one in which this year’s jury president Juliette Binoche protested Panahi’s 2010 arrest and imprisonment while she accepted her Best Actress prize for Certified Copy. The latter image, one of the most indelible of recent Cannes history, also circulated a bit after the lineup was announced several weeks before the festival began, as many doubted Binoche’s capacity for impartiality. Whether or not Panahi’s film needed only […]
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Cannes 2025: Entroncamento, The Mastermind
In a piece about the documentaries at this year’s Cannes, Slate’s Sam Adams noted the existence of Put Your Soul on Your Hand and Walk but declined to name the section it was in, referring to it only as “a low-profile sidebar devoted to independent productions.” That would be ACID, which—with the possible exception of the CINEF section that shows film school shorts—is, yes, probably the lowest-profile of the Cannes premieres sections. To decide ACID isn’t worth naming is a reminder of the infinite proliferation of hierarchies at Cannes; there are dark rumors that even though the press badges are […]
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“It’s Not Enough to Only Have Narrative”: Hlynur Pálmason on Cannes 2025 Premiere The Love That Remains
Icelandic filmmaker Hlynur Pálmason’s epic 2022 film Godland mapped the crisis of faith experienced by a 19th-century Danish priest on a mission to Iceland. A majestic tapestried shot of a horse skeleton lifts viewers from the difficult physical and emotional terrain of the film’s narrative world into a realm that is more formal, ethereal, and symbolic. Similarly, Pálmason’s fourth feature, The Love That Remains, which premiered at Cannes last weekend, is only in some layers a dark comedy about the varied pains experienced by a rural Icelandic family undergoing a separation of parents Anna (Saga Garðarsdóttir) and Magnús (Sverrir Guðnason). Horses […]
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Cannes 2025: Highest 2 Lowest, Die My Love, The Love That Remains
Spike Lee’s maligned 2013 update of Park Chan-wook’s 2003 revenge picture, Oldboy, did little to inspire confidence in his latest reimagining of an Asian classic, this time relocating Akira Kurosawa’s High and Low (1963) to DUMBO in Brooklyn. Given a very Spike title of Highest 2 Lowest, the Denzel Washington vehicle is expectedly brimming with the director’s signature expressive filmmaking—wildly cubist jump cut coverage within establishing shots, double-take character greetings and spontaneous shifts into saturated 16mm footage of New York abound—and tends to feel more like another excuse to create a cinematic love letter to his hometown and the Black […]
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Cannes 2025: It Was Just an Accident, The Secret Agent
Sentenced by the Iranian government in 2010 on spurious grounds to six years in prison, a punishment that came with a 20-year ban on making movies, Jafar Panahi immediately set about violating the latter. Title notwithstanding, 2011’s This is Not a Film was what I’d call an “actual movie,” spry and self-reflexive like his first two features, 1995’s The White Balloon and 1997’s The Mirror. The post-Film features that followed—Closed Curtain, Taxi, 3 Faces and No Bears—merited that first post-ban title more. Leaning upon his undeniably courageous status as a (since) multiple-times-jailed dissident filmmaker, those works foregrounded the director as a benign […]
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Rosé, Learning about Co-Productions and a Charli XCX DJ Set: Ani Schroeter’s Cannes Producer Network Diary
Producer Ani Schroeter (Bunnylovr) attended the 2025 Cannes Film Festival as The Gotham Cannes Producers Network Fellow. Below find her wrap on the festival and her experiences at the Producers Network. I feel like I’m coming down from my first week as a high school freshman. The Cannes Film Festival was daunting, invigorating and I cannot wait to go back. While at most U.S. festivals, running into film friends on the street is the norm, at Cannes, they are few and far between. At least for a newbie like me. This was my first year at Cannes, and I am […]
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American Pavilion Emerging Filmmaker Showcase Announces 2025 Winners
The American Pavilion at the Cannes Film Festival has announced the winners of this year’s Emerging Filmmaker Showcase sponsored by Gold House. Gold House awarded the inaugural Cultural Impact award to Andy “Celeste” Diep for Happy New Year, Ms. Luna. This award was conceived to recognize a filmmaker across the showcase’s categories whose work exemplifies excellence in multicultural narratives or underrepresented perspectives. “Happy New Year, Ms. Luna” also won the Emerging Filmmaker LGBTQ+ Award. The film’s director, Andy “Celeste” Diep is a AmPav Student Program Alumni from 2015. “It’s been wonderful to have almost all the 25 filmmakers with their […]
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“We’re All Fighting to Tell Our Stories”: Daniel Tantalean’s Cannes Producer Diary #2
In the Summers producer Daniel Tantalean is a 2025 Gotham Cannes Producer Network Fellow and is blogging about his experience at the festival here at Filmmaker. Like his first post, this second entry takes the form of a letter written home to his fiance. My Love, I’m at the halfway point of this experience. And though I’ve started most mornings by sending you a quick text, just something sweet for you to wake up to, I still miss you terribly. Being here without you by my side feels like something is always slightly out of frame. At this point, sleep […]
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Cannes 2025: The Phoenician Scheme, Nouvelle Vague
Though Wes Anderson’s last consensus-acclaimed feature was 2014’s The Grand Budapest Hotel, his subsequent, progressively more divisive films have been profitable enough to emerge at a regular clip. I’m guessing this is thanks to the purchasing power of elder millennials who had Rushmore and Royal Tenenbaums imprinted on them in their teen years and now faithfully show up for each new work. For those unshakeable fans, myself included, the question of whether Anderson’s entered an era of baroque and inadvertent self-parody is a non-issue, and The Phoenician Scheme is unlikely to change anyone’s mind in either direction. Even by his […]
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Cannes 2025: Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning; Eddington; Sirât
Eight years after Cannes dipped its toes into VR waters with their presentation of Alejandro González Iñárritu‘s ultra-haptic empathy machine Carne y Arena (2017), the festival’s general delegate Thierry Frémaux continues to promote cinema’s expanding XR toolbox. In addition to bringing back the festival’s Immersive Competition for a second year—from what I saw of the press tour held a few hours before the Opening Ceremony, it would be difficult to justify a third—Frémaux also, per an interview with Screen International, trained this year’s festival staff using an AI version of his own voice when he couldn’t be present to address them […]
