Cannes Film Festival 2017
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Cannes Dispatch #4: Thoughts on Prize Winners 120 Beats Per Minute, You Were Never Really Here, The Killing of a Sacred Deer
For the third year in a row, Cannes’s Main Competition jury — this year comprised of jury president Pedro Almodóvar, German filmmaker Maren Ade, and several celebrity industry professionals whose tastes in cinema had never previously been of much concern to anyone — awarded the Palme d’Or to a movie I didn’t much like. Considered by some to be True Cinema’s answer to the Oscars, the medium’s actual most prestigious prize has suffered some blows to its reputation in the last two years after being handed to mediocre films (Dheepan in 2015 and I, Daniel Blake last year) that weren’t […]
by Blake Williams on May 30, 2017 -
At Cannes 2017, The Square Wins Palme d’Or; Coppola Best Director; and Lynne Ramsay’s Latest Wins Two
Here, as they are announced, are the winners of the 2017 Cannes Film Festival. Palme d’Or: The Square, Ruben Östlund. Special Prize for the 70th Anniversary: Nicole Kidman Grand Prix: 120 Beats Per Minute, directed by Robin Campillo Jury Prize: Loveless, Andrey Zvyagintsev Best Actress: Diane Kruger, In the Fade Best Actor: Joaquin Phoenix, You Were Never Really Here Best Director: Sofia Coppola, The Beguiled Best Screenplay: The Killing of a Sacred Deer (Yorgos Lathimos and Efthymis Filippou) and Lynne Ramsay (You Were Never Really Here) The Camera d’Or (given to best first film): Jeunne Femme/Montparnasse Bienvenue, directed by Leonor […]
by Scott Macaulay on May 28, 2017 -
Twin Peaks and Film as Ritual: Sam Kuhn’s Cannes Diary, the Coda
Director, screenwriter and boatbuilder (!) Sam Kuhn is in Cannes premiering his short film, Möbius — described as “a moth-eaten tale of magic and mutation half remembered by a teen poet who’s beloved lies lifeless in a stream” — in Critic’s Week. Filmmaker asked Kuhn, who hails from the Pacific Northwest, to keep a diary of his experiences, which rapidly went from jet-lagged to deeply strange. Here is his final entry; click here for them all. CODA Full night sleep. First in what feels like forever. Hit the 4:00 PM day-after-screening of Twin Peaks in a Toronto Raptors jacket gifted […]
by Sam Kuhn on May 28, 2017 -
Crying Seagull Tears Above the Croisette: Sam Kuhn’s Cannes Diary, Part Six
Director, screenwriter and boatbuilder (!) Sam Kuhn is in Cannes premiering his short film, Möbius — described as “a moth-eaten tale of magic and mutation half remembered by a teen poet who’s beloved lies lifeless in a stream” — in Critic’s Week. Filmmaker asked Kuhn, who hails from the Pacific Northwest, to keep a diary of his experiences, which rapidly went from jet-lagged to deeply strange. Here is his sixth entry; click here for them all. Day 8 Eight and it’s full circle, which seems fitting as “8” is a basic Möbius-like shape. Woke and walked immediately to the “morning […]
by Sam Kuhn on May 27, 2017 -
Cannes Dispatch #3: Jeannette, the Childhood of Joan of Arc; The Florida Project; Good Time
Cannes, like virtually every other major international film festival showcasing feature-length filmmaking, is largely devoted to cinema that participates in a primarily theatrical mode — dialogue- and performance-driven works that feature subjects with whom we are meant to empathize to some degree. This is an expectation, fused into the medium’s DNA when it was still young, that is embedded in the layout of the festival itself; it’s the world’s largest film market (and therefore tilts mainstream, toward things that can make money), and the prizes it offers — honouring exemplary screenwriting and thespian turns rather than, for example, montage, photography, […]
by Blake Williams on May 26, 2017 -
“Wing Tip to Wing Tip, Across the Miramar”: Sam Kuhn’s Cannes Diary Part 5
Director, screenwriter and boatbuilder (!) Sam Kuhn is in Cannes premiering his short film, Möbius — described as “a moth-eaten tale of magic and mutation half remembered by a teen poet who’s beloved lies lifeless in a stream” — in Critic’s Week. Filmmaker asked Kuhn, who hails from the Pacific Northwest, to keep a diary of his experiences, which rapidly went from jet-lagged to deeply strange. Here is his fifth entry; click here for them all. Day 7 Up at 7:00 for Coppola’s Beguiled, should’ve taken note of the name for I was indeed beguiled. Not a single brave or […]
by Sam Kuhn on May 26, 2017 -
Crystals, a Severed Head and “the Cannes Experience”: Sam Kuhn’s Cannes Diary, Part Three
Director, screenwriter and boatbuilder (!) Sam Kuhn is in Cannes premiering his short film, Möbius — described as “a moth-eaten tale of magic and mutation half remembered by a teen poet who’s beloved lies lifeless in a stream” — in Critic’s Week. Filmmaker asked Kuhn, who hails from the Pacific Northwest, to keep a diary of his experiences, which rapidly went from jet-lagged to deeply strange. Here is his third entry; click here for them all. Day 5 The Hungarian ghost emailed producer L to ask, “What was the end destiny of the rock?” Her last post to Facebook, “Life, […]
by Sam Kuhn on May 24, 2017 -
The Search for Black Rock: Sam Kuhn’s Cannes Diary, Part Two
Director, screenwriter and boatbuilder (!) Sam Kuhn is in Cannes premiering his short film, Möbius — described as “a moth-eaten tale of magic and mutation half remembered by a teen poet who’s beloved lies lifeless in a stream” — in Critic’s Week. Filmmaker asked Kuhn, who hails from the Pacific Northwest, to keep a diary of his experiences, which rapidly went from jet-lagged to deeply strange. Here is his second entry; click here for them all. Day 3 I’m now feeling foolish, and looking foolish too with my cherry red nose. Without Black Rock things went from bad to — […]
by Sam Kuhn on May 23, 2017 -
Cannes Dispatch #2: Faces Places, Claire’s Camera, The Square
At some point the past year, Rive Gauche icon Agnès Varda and French photographer JR went on a road trip through rural France documenting whatever locals they encountered and, lucky for us, decided to make a movie about it. The main activity of their excursion involved producing pieces for JR’s ongoing Inside Out project, wherein he takes portraits of the subjects he happens upon (or lets them enter into his van-cum-photobooth to capture their own images), prints them out at a scale somewhere between life-size and mammoth, and then pastes the images onto a building or transportation vessel that is meaningful […]
by Blake Williams on May 22, 2017 -
The Curse (?) of Black Rock: Director Sam Kuhn’s Cannes Diary
Director, screenwriter and boatbuilder (!) Sam Kuhn is in Cannes premiering his short film, Möbius — described as “a moth-eaten tale of magic and mutation half remembered by a teen poet who’s beloved lies lifeless in a stream” — in Critic’s Week. Filmmaker asked Kuhn, who hails from the Pacific Northwest, to keep a diary of his experiences, which rapidly went from jet-lagged to deeply strange. Here are his first two entries; click here for them all. Day 1 First day of the festival in truth and after months of confusing-as-hell email chains with the French, surprise re-edit of the […]
by Sam Kuhn on May 22, 2017
