Festivals & Events
Festivals & Events
-
“Maybe Life is Just Killing Time Between Festivals”: Sarah Winshall’s Cannes Diary #3
Producer Sarah Winshall (We’re All Going to the World’s Fair) has been posting diary entries from her trip to the 2022 Cannes Film Festival. Read her previous reports here. Don’t worry guys, I’ve gotten some rest and I’m feeling much better. In fact, I’ve been back home in Los Angeles two nights and both nights I dreamed I was still in Cannes. They were pleasant dreams in which my subconscious invented new films that everyone was excited to see, I bumped into new friends and was whisked off to various parties. In these dreams I’m rushing around but I’m not […]
-
Cannes 2022: The Awards, Close, Broker and Boy from Heaven
Only a couple of months after the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Science’s completion of their decades-long endeavor to totally delegitimize the Oscars, Cannes provided another argument for doing away with all cinema awards entirely. The Vincent Lindon-led jury of nine couldn’t manage to make admirable choices even as they lauded virtually half the contenders in the field. Then again, at least one member of said jury admitted to not knowing who or how old Jerzy Skolimowski is until after the screening of his radiant EO—ex aequo winner, nevertheless, of the Jury Prize (something like third or fourth or […]
-
Champagne, the Red Carpet and Stars at Noon: Pepi Ginsberg’s Cannes Diary
Filmmaker Pepi Ginsberg is attending Cannes for the first time with her short, The Pass, in the La Cinef section. Below, she begins a diary series on her trip there. Read an interview with Ginsberg about the film here and part one of this series here. — Editor 5/25/22 Had a celebratory bottle of champagne with the team. It felt good to sit, take a beat, share the drink. Saw Nostalgia. Was fascinating to see Naples, I’ve never been. It was painted as some kind of inferno. The grit was palpable and exotic. Called it a night after the screening […]
-
Cannes 2022: Stars at Noon, Tori and Lokita
In France, I mostly don’t get immediately ID’d as American, which I assume is partially because I don’t conform to braying jackass US tourist type and partially because, the older I get, the more I look indeterminately “other.” Generally I first get spoken to in French and play along if I can, then when I can’t keep up I get “Do you speak English?” This is pretty flattering and will obviously only be an increasing asset as the American Experiment continues to go up in flames. A friend noted that, with its virulent displays of racism, Cristian Mungiu’s R.M.N. could just as […]
-
Cannes 2022: Godland, Pacifiction
Day 10 is winding down, and it’s become quite clear that, as was the case for the Berlinale last February, this year’s Cannes is a significant regression after a 2021 edition that overflowed with a pre-pandemic backlog. So many of the films I’ve seen, produced and completed (if not completely developed) in the midst of COVID-era constraints, have felt smaller, cheaper, cruder than what I’ve encountered here in editions past—not a judgment per se, of course, but a new, ill-fitted look from a festival that so pointedly touts its eventitude: the spectacle, the glamor, the scope of its pet auteur’s […]
-
Annie Ernaux and David Ernaux-Briot on The Super 8 Years
For Annie Ernaux fans, The Super 8 Years is something better than a movie—it’s effectively a new Ernaux novella, assembled from home movie footage shot by her late ex-husband Philippe Ernaux and directed by her son David. The author reads her text over a trim 61 minutes, assembled from footage shot by Philippe beginning in 1972, when he first bought a Bell & Howell super 8 camera, until their separation in 1981. Ernaux’s memoirs have examined her life while rarely overlapping what’s recalled from one book to another, which is true here even as what we see fills out her work: […]
-
Pepi Ginsberg’s Cannes Diary, #1
Filmmaker Pepi Ginsberg is attending Cannes for the first time with her short, The Pass, in the La Cinef section. Below, she begins a diary series on her trip there. Read an interview with Ginsberg about the film here. — Editor 5/23/22 The plane was delayed. In all of my Cannes anticipation (anxiety), I was convinced the plane would never leave Newark. That feels very existential. Stuck in the United Lounge for the rest of time. We did leave. And only an hour and half late. An easy flight. No major hiccups. Saw a sign for Gael Garcia Bernal when […]
-
Cannes 2022: De Humani Corporis Fabrica, Crimes of the Future, Jerry Lee Lewis: Trouble in Mind, Les Amandiers
The man sitting two seats over had averted his eyes from the screen a few times before he finally hit his breaking point. I saw a penis and a drill of some kind coming right for the urethra and heard a doctor saying that he was going to put the device on the “Kalashnikov setting.” What, I wondered, might that mean? When the drill started pumping away and blood spurted, the poor guy had had enough and exited swiftly, and I absolutely couldn’t blame him. This was the second screening of the instantly infamous De Humani Corporis Fabrica that day; after the […]
-
At Cannes: Sandra Schulberg and IndieCollect Call For an Indie Filmmaker Bill of Rights
In Cannes, Sandra Schulberg, producer, co-founder of IFP (now The Gotham) and head of IndieCollect, participated today in a CNC Discussion on Film Restoration, sponsored by the Hollywood Foreign Press Association. In her prepared remarks, which she gave to Filmmaker, she is calling for a new Indie Filmmaker Bill of Rights in an attempt to save a generation of independent cinema. Read her remarks below. Forty-four years ago, in 1978, international critics here in Cannes gave the first Camera d’Or Award to an American indie film. The next year they did the same. I am here today to gratefully acknowledge […]
-
Cannes 2022: Triangle of Sadness, Magdala, The Natural History of Destruction
Triangle of Sadness stands as the conclusion of what Ruben Östlund has recently deemed a trilogy about “being male in our times.” (It will not be a quartet.) As with the middle entry of said triptych (his 2017 Palme d’Or-winner The Square), Triangle is a movie of set pieces blanketed by a shapeshifting social critique obsessed with the myriad ways in which civilization and morality distort human life. Its initial target is the modeling industry, a chapter (the first of three, Östlund’s new favorite number) dominated by cheap shots at the scene’s stereotypical superficiality and cattiness, especially its particular gender […]
