Festivals & Events
Festivals & Events
-
Blue is the Warmest Color Wins the 2013 Cannes Palme d’Or
In a ceremony hosted by actress Audrey Tatou and with a jury headed by director Steven Spielberg, the 2013 Cannes Film Festival awarded its top prize, the Palme d’Or, to Abdellatif Kechiche’s lesbian teen romance, Blue is the Warmest Color. In an unusual move for this auteur-centric festival, the jury gave the award to Kechiche and his two lead actresses, Adele Exarchopoulos and Lea Seydoux. The three-hour film, which also won the FIPRESCI prize, was bought for the U.S. during the festival by IFC’s Sundance Selects. The jury distributed awards evenly among the majority of films that had been buzzed […]
-
Cannes 2013: Polanski’s Venus in Fur and Katrin Gebbe’s Tore Tanzt
My last day in Cannes brought about a number of mixed emotions: relief that the somewhat grueling schedule of waking up for early morning press screenings was coming to an end, disappointment that my time at the festival was over (and that I was shut out of the afternoon screening of Jim Jarmusch’s Only Lovers Left Alive, bringing unceremonious closure to my festival experience), and excitement that I have had the experience of attending a festival like Cannes where there is so much energy devoted to the idea of cinema. Two of the last films I saw at the festival, […]
-
Cannes 2013: Prizes for Directors’ Fortnight and Critics’ Week Announced
As Cannes is coming to a close, the accolades are being handed out. We still have to wait for the Competition award ceremony,which will be on Sunday, but the Directors’ Fortnight and Critics Week have already both bestowed honors on their films. Though Directors’ Fortnight does technically have a competition, nevertheless prizes are handed out, with this year Guillaume Gallienne’s flamboyant comedy Les Garçons Et Guillaume, A Table! (an autobiographical piece about his difficult relationship with his mother) taking two prizes, and The Selfish Giant — Clio Barnard’s follow-up to The Arbor, a Cannes favorite in 2010 — also winning an award. […]
-
Cannes 2013: Gray’s The Immigrant and Sorrentino’s The Great Beauty
James Gray’s The Immigrant is Classic Hollywood melodrama, done incredibly well, a film that powerfully portrays the emotional journey of a Polish immigrant, Ewa (Marion Cotillard), and her pimp, Bruno (Joaquin Phoenix). It offers a powerful historical account of the connections between the mass immigration to the United States and the often desperate desire to achieve the American Dream, while also serving as a brutal reminder of the ways in which that dream was exploited by people who were willing to take advantage of new arrivals, many of whom were overwhelmed by their new home. Gray’s film borrows from classical […]
-
Cannes 2013: Payne’s Nebraska and Puenzo’s Wakolda
Alexander Payne’s Nebraska is an impressive achievement, a fresh and innovative take on that most familiar of genres, the road movie, one that takes conventions about the American heartland and turns them on their head. It’s also a story about a father and son learning to see and understand each other for the first time. The film opens with a shot of Woody Grant (Bruce Dern in what should be a performance that collects numerous awards) shuffling purposefully down a Billings, Montana, highway, his scraggly beard, limping gait and weathered face suggesting a man who has struggled for the little […]
-
Cannes 2013: Soderbergh’s Behind the Candelabra and Refn’s Only God Forgives
If Behind the Candelabra is Steven Soderbergh’s last film before he retires to pursue other interests, it serves as a fitting tribute to his fascination with celebrity and to his ability to depict complex emotional relationships in an accessible and engaging fashion. The film depicts the tumultuous relationship between Liberace (Michael Douglas) and his lover, Scott Thorson (Matt Damon), during the last few years of the pianist’s life, relating the story primarily from Scott’s perspective as he is welcomed to see behind Liberace’s widely recognized stage persona and to gain access to the person behind the image. When the film […]
-
Cannes 2013: Portraits of Purgatory
Portraits of purgatory dot this year’s Cannes Film Festival, with movies that run the gamut in terms of styles and techniques: epic drama, cheeky comedy, documentary, animation, and surrealism. No matter what the setting, the plight is the same, with characters stuck in a cycle of emotional limbo where hope for happiness floats tantalizingly but incessantly out of reach. The most accomplished of the group is The Great Beauty, Paolo Sorrentino’s voluptuously crafted riff on La Dolce Vita and a masterful study of 65-year-old Jep Gambardella (Toni Servillo), a dilettante journalist still coasting on the acclaim of a single early-career […]
-
Cannes 2013: Franco’s As I Lay Dying and Robichaud’s Sarah Prefers to Run
While I was in graduate school, many years ago, I wrote a master’s thesis on William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying and have always loved the novel’s rich layering of the multiple, fragmentary points-of-view. Faulkner used to this technique — which he once described as “thirteen ways of looking at a blackbird” — to depict the Bundren family’s mock epic journey from their little hamlet to the county seat of Jefferson, where they have promised to bury the family’s matriarch, Addie. Because of my knowledge of the novel, I approached James Franco’s adaptation with a great deal of trepidation. Add […]
-
Ten Lessons on Filmmaking from James Franco
There’s a trend in actor-turned-director helmed films at Cannes this year, an impeccable direction of the people on screen. You can tell there’s a sense of trust and cohesive goal to create something great. One of the clearest examples of this is James Franco’s new feature film, As I Lay Dying, based on the great American classic by William Faulkner, the story of the death of Addie Bundren and her family’s quest to honor her wish to be buried in the town of Jefferson. The vivid characters have come to life on the big screen through Franco’s split-screen filmmaking, led by […]
-
Cannes 2013: Kore-eda’s Like Father, Like Son and Miike’s Shield of Straw
Hirakazu Kore-eda’s Like Father, Like Son engages with questions of family and identity, exploring what it means to be a father, using a plot device in which children from two different families are switched at birth, a detail that is only discovered when the sons are about to enroll in school. The film’s primary point of identification is Ryota, a young father and ambitious businessman who strives to provide for his family and also to ensure that his son will have every opportunity for success. This desire for success is conveyed from the very opening shot, in which Ryota’s son, […]
