Festivals & Events
Festivals & Events
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Cannes 2023: The Pot-au-Feu, Portraits of Ghosts
To celebrate Cannes is to celebrate film history itself—or at least so the fest would have it. But while there’s certainly meaningful and genuine overlap, any self-venerating mythology is going to breed unwelcome byproducts, as at the premiere of Jean-Luc Godard’s “final” film, Trailer of a Movie That Will Never Exist: “Phony Wars.” (Its actual finality status is TBD, as Goodfellas has more of his work, in whatever form, still to sell.) The short was preceded by a French TV documentary, Godard by Godard, which was fairly useless in part because it ignores half of his life and work while playing the […]
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Cannes 2023: Awards, A Prince, Directors’ Fortnight, Close Your Eyes
Cannes wrapped another edition last weekend, and a new batch of prize winners have been announced. I’ve typically used this final wrap-up to offer brief comments on many of said winners, namely those Vadim and I didn’t already address in prior dispatches. Ruben Östlund and co. did well, though, because the only victor currently unremarked upon is Wim Wenders’s Perfect Days, a poetic drama about a Japanese toilet cleaner for which its lead, Koji Yakusho, was awarded Best Actor. We already published my discussion with Wenders about his new 3D film, Anselm, which premiered as a Special Screening earlier in […]
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Cannes 2023: Club Zero, Inside the Yellow Cocoon Shell
Faith, divinity, transcendence and/or what one might otherwise call “magical” interventions remain thematic staples of arthouse filmmaking, not least in Cannes films that carve out a space for poetic languors and modest effects work which elevate non-commercial films’ often make-do or naturalistic mises-en-scène. Austere Austrian auteur Jessica Hausner is not necessarily in need of stylistic elevation—her ongoing collaboration with DP Martin Gschlacht produces immaculately, almost imposingly detailed front-to-back compositions—yet her work remains devoted to characters navigating the world’s capacity for miracles, spirituality or some great beyond. Despite an opening on-screen trigger warning preparing the audience for upsettingly frank depictions of eating […]
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Cannes 2023: Anatomy of a Fall, Fallen Leaves
Sandra Hüller enters Justine Triet’s Sybil midway, as the hilariously frazzled director of a European co-production who keeps barking in English while trying to keep the set moving. Hüller’s appearance is unexpected in several ways: a film about a therapist-client relationship suddenly shifts focus to The Shoot From Hell, and while the expected reference point for a European movie shot on an island would be Contempt, Triet instead pays homage to Roberto Rossellini’s Stromboli. Nor is this the film’s final narrative slight-of-hand, as Sibyl‘s final act is a drama about alcoholism—throughout, the thematic emphases are always slightly off from where you’d […]
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The American Pavilion Announces Emerging Filmmaker Showcase Winners
The American Pavilion announces today the six winners of the 2023 Emerging Filmmaker Showcase at Cannes. Selected from 38 short films in competition, winners were chosen by a jury that includes agents, managers, producers, and industry members in the following categories: Student Short Films, Student Documentaries, Emerging Filmmaker Short Films, Emerging Filmmaker Documentaries, Emerging Filmmaker LGBTQ Showcase Films and an Alumni Showcase. Now in its 26th edition, the Emerging Filmmaker Showcase serves as an opportunity for young filmmakers to have their work seen by Cannes Festival and Film Market attendees. Prize packs this year were sponsored by Final Draft, Write […]
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“Sometimes the Present Erases the Past, and Sometimes the Past Erases the Present”: Steve McQueen on His Cannes-Premiering Occupied City
Tourists in Amsterdam typically stop at the Anne Frank House, but the ever-moving conga line of visitors tends to work against reflecting on the reality of its rooms. Steve McQueen’s Occupied City opens up a space for contemplation of a hundred-plus houses, buildings, and other sites across Amsterdam that are marked by World War II and the Holocaust in some way, tracing scars and trauma that may no longer be visible, much less widely known. Informed by an illustrated book by McQueen’s partner, Bianca Stigter (who directed Three Minutes: A Lengthening), it’s a living atlas: scenes of pandemic-era Amsterdam, overlaid […]
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“The Lumières Dreamt of 3D”: Wim Wenders on Anselm at Cannes 2023
German filmmaker Wim Wenders has two new features in Cannes this year, one of which, Anselm, is a documentary portrait of German artist Anselm Kiefer. Like Pina (2011)—his filmed portrait of the late Tanztheater dancer and choreographer Pina Bausch—Anselm was shot and projected in 3D (his fourth solo feature to be filmed in the format, with a fifth already on the way), reasserting Wenders’ dedication to the format at a time when few filmmakers in the industry not named James Cameron or Ang Lee continue to explore it. Kiefer’s work, like Bausch’s, is naturally accommodating to 3D photography. Filmed at various […]
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Cannes 2023: Lisandro Alonso on Eureka
Lisandro Alonso’s Eureka, which premiered as a Special Screening at this year’s Cannes, begins as a parodic reworking of the filmmaker’s last feature, 2014’s Jauja. There, Viggo Mortensen played a Danish captain crossing inhospitable Argentinian territory in the 1880s with his daughter (Viilbjørk Malling Agger), while encountering what from his perspective are “natives” to be fearfully avoided; Eureka renders that feature’s “not without my daughter” elements as a black-and-white Western set in an indeterminate any-Western-town of America. Mortensen and Agger are once again father-and-child, but this time he’s a considerably dirtier and more disreputable cowboy type. In impeccable academy-ratio black-and-white with rounded […]
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Cannes 2023: Asteroid City
The negative talking points around Wes Anderson—too twee, airlessly production-designed, an aesthetic in search of emotions—have metastasized thanks to a wave of AI-generated trailers of movies “in his style” (Lord of the Rings, The Matrix, Star Wars—no, I’m not linking!) that seemingly prove computer fake can be just as bad as the real thing. I wish I could credit the tweet I saw (and should’ve fav’d) which pointed out that maybe part of the reason Anderson’s aesthetic is the only one being repeatedly run through the AI mill is because even a barely-film-literate coder can figure out its basic components, as codified in […]
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Cannes 2023: The Zone of Interest, Killers of the Flower Moon, May December
Jonathan Glazer’s The Zone of Interest, instantly hailed as a masterpiece upon the conclusion of its first screenings in Cannes last Friday, finds the British filmmaker once again engineering a vehicle with which to burrow beneath viewers’ skin. After opening his previous film, an adaptation of Michel Faber’s 2000 sci-fi novel Under the Skin, with an on-screen reminder of cinema’s intrinsic visuality—darkness, then pulsating orbs and, finally/explicitly, a dilating pupil—here Glazer turns to the aural. Another literary adaptation (this time of a work by Martin Amis, who died of oesophageal cancer the same day Glazer walked the red carpet), The […]
