Festivals & Events
Festivals & Events
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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 […]
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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 […]
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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: […]
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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 […]
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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 […]
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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 […]
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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 […]
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Dress Codes, EO, Fatigue and Dealmaking: Sarah Winshall’s Cannes Diary #2
I’ve hit the fatigue section of my journey. Time is irrelevant, and I spilled several glasses of water during pitch meetings because my motor skills are suffering. I read back on my last journal, and it seems like a story from a stranger, someone much saner than I. It was probably the Top Gun: Maverick-themed military fly-by that opened this portal to another dimension. Does anyone know if the red white and blue smoke coming out of their engines were supposed to be celebrating France or the USA? 5/19 I woke up feeling weird. I only slept for four hours […]
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Cannes 2022: Brother and Sister, Pamfir, R.M.N.
Arnaud Desplechin’s Brother and Sister ended to the audible reception of somewhere around seven boos, two derisive whistles and nothing else; if you’re someone who believes indifference is a worse reaction than active hostility, this somehow seemed to split the worst possible difference. Consensus holds, not inaccurately, that Desplechin’s peak work is, at least for now, behind him, with the arguable exception of My Golden Days—non-coincidentally, a prequel to 1996’s My Sex Life. His experiments outside of erratic interpersonal dramas, like 2011’s self-explanatorily titled Jimmy P.: Psychotherapy of a Plains Indian and 2019’s crime drama Oh Mercy!, have been received with tepid bewilderment. I have more sympathy for these […]
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Cannes 2022: Eo, Enys Men
“What if this movie’s just a donkey green screened onto a bunch of Koyaanisqatsi-looking footage?” I joked to a friend as the lights dimmed for Polish master Jerzy Skolimowski’s new film, Eo. It wasn’t, but honestly I wasn’t as far off as I thought. Touted (in the media, at least) as a remake of Robert Bresson’s 1966 classic Au hasard Balthazar, the 84 year-old’s latest offers one of the more radical updates of that film imaginable. Pitched somewhere between sacrilege and tribute (Skolimowski is a notorious Bresson fan, even if his work has rarely shown his influence), Eo is an […]
