Cannes Film Festival 2021
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“You Never Know When You Will Have a Great Image”: Ryusuke Hamaguchi on the Oscar-Winning Drive My Car
Originally appearing here in July, 2021, Filmmaker‘s interview with Ryusuke Hamaguchi about Drive My Car is being reposted today alongside the film’s Best International Feature win at the 2022 Academy Awards. — Editor It might strike some as sacrilege when I say that the excitement I’ve felt around Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s run of recent work reminds me of watching (and catching up with) the films of Arnaud Desplechin in the 2000s. Drive My Car, which had its world premiere in Competition at Cannes, follows the ecstasies and agonies and everything in-between of Happy Hour, Asako I & II (worth singling out […]
by Nicolas Rapold on Mar 28, 2022 -
Gessica Généus’s Freda: A Female Gaze on Life in Haiti
The making of Freda, the narrative feature debut of actor, singer and documentarian Gessica Généus, shot between lockdowns in the endlessly troubled streets of Port-au-Prince, Haiti, was “like a sprint,” says Généus, “I was rushing, I didn’t sleep.” Freda is a family drama masterfully set against the backdrop of the chaos of life in Haiti. With a wry eye on societal issues, Freda offers a heartbreaking and complex female gaze on life in a machismo culture. Freda received a standing ovation at its Un Certain Regard screening at the 2021 Cannes festival and was only the second Haitian film to […]
by Annie Nocenti on Jan 7, 2022 -
“Someone Needs to Shed Light On This Issue”: Justin Chon on His Adoptee Deportation Melodrama, Blue Bayou
Justin Chon first came to the world’s attention playing Eric Yorkie, a supporting character in the Twilight movies. The global success of that young-vampires-in-love franchise helped Chon land lead roles in films such as 21 & Over, Revenge of the Green Dragons, and Seoul Searching, but all the while, the freshly minted movie star was honing his craft as a writer and director. First came 2015’s little-seen Man Up (“That was my film school”), then the breakthrough of Gook, which won the NEXT Audience Award at Sundance in 2017. A bracing look at the 1992 Rodney King riots from a […]
by Nelson Kim on Sep 16, 2021 -
“We Had to Combine Three Different Islands”: Antoneta Alamat Kusijanovic on Cannes Caméra d’Or-Winner Murina
The winner of the Caméra d’Or for the best debut feature at Cannes this year was the maritime Murina, a coming-of-age drama of slow-motion escape from Croatian writer-director Antoneta Alamat Kusijanovic. Premiering in Directors’ Fortnight, the sun-baked film tracks teenaged Julija (Gracija Filipivoc) as she slowly but surely pushes for autonomy from her grumpy father, Ante (Leon Lucev), who runs their family like an impatient captain. A visit from a longtime friend, bekhaki’d and comfortable businessman Javier (Cliff Curtis), sets thoughts spinning for Julija and her youthful mother, Nela (Danica Curcic), as Ante frantically schemes to sell land. Kusijanovic brilliantly […]
by Nicolas Rapold on Jul 26, 2021 -
Cannes Film Festival 2021: Awards, Vortex, Train Again
I typically aim to use this last post as my awards clean-up, wherein I tackle the prize-winning films I didn’t address in my previous dispatches. This year will have to be different, since Spike Lee’s jury trophied many of the films I already found generative enough to have given them space here. Not atypically, though, the panel failed to hand any accolades to the two films that in my opinion were the most laudable among the competition slate—namely, Bruno Dumont’s rapturously off-kilter France, which could have justifiably taken any prize on the menu except Best Actor (although Macron’s unknowing cameo […]
by Blake Williams on Jul 22, 2021 -
Cannes Film Festival 2021 Critic’s Notebook 5: Apichatpong Weerasethakul
Information, context and mystery have been on my mind quite a bit since seeing the two new films that Thai filmmaker Apichatpong Weerasethakul brought to this year’s Cannes: his feature-length, Tilda Swinton-starring, Colombia-set Memoria, and the 13-minute “Night Colonies,” the segment that concludes The Year of the Everlasting Storm omnibus project, which collects seven short films about creativity in the time of COVID-19 from global arthouse heavyweights such as Jafar Panahi, Dominga Sotomayor and David Lowery. This is partly because Weerasethakul’s new films, like the rest of his cinema, negotiate the divide between our sensory and cognitive functions better than […]
by Blake Williams on Jul 18, 2021 -
Cannes Film Festival 2021 Critic’s Notebook 4: The Tsugua Diaries, Titane
Films in this year’s Cannes (especially the better ones) have been prone to metafiction—demonstrating and examining the process of making movies, creating images, writing and rehearsing scenes, or editing sound, putting the creative process on full display. It’s hardly a new trend in art cinema—make what you know, love and experience, and your livelihood is bound to bleed in some way or another—but self-reflexity is clearly in style, and Miguel Gomes & Maureen Fazendeiro’s structural, faux making-of puzzle film The Tsugua Diaries may be the most exemplary case. True to its title, the diaristic Tsugua fictitiously dramatizes its own production, which disintegrates […]
by Blake Williams on Jul 16, 2021 -
Shooting on a Moving Period Russian Train: Juho Kuosmanen on Cannes 2021 Competition Premiere Compartment No. 6
In Juho Kuosmanen’s debut feature The Happiest Day in the Life of Olli Mäki, a Finnish boxer (and baker) gets a title shot at Helsinki Olympic Stadium against the American featherweight champion. At their joint press conference, the Finnish media is desperate to hear from their distinguished foreign guest: “What do you think of our country?” The real Olli Mäki lost by second-round TKO, but this movie about a small nation jostling for recognition on the world stage took top honors at Un Certain Regard in 2016. Kuosmanen is back at Cannes this year and he’s gone up a class: […]
by Mark Asch on Jul 13, 2021 -
Cannes Film Festival 2021 Critic’s Notebook 3: Drive My Car, Bergman Island
“I am not really necessarily interested in performance, per se, but in emotion,” Ryûsuke Hamaguchi told Vadim Rizov back in 2019 when asked how meaningful the work of Jacques Rivette was to him. The answer went on to more or less say “not very,” which is even more incredible now that his new three-hour Murakami adaptation, Drive My Car, has landed, so absorbed with the art and nuances of rehearsal and performance that the French New Waver will inevitably be the default assumed touchstone once again. Indeed, Drive My Car is, along with its 40-page source material (found in Murakami’s […]
by Blake Williams on Jul 13, 2021 -
“What is Our Duty Today as Viewers?”: Abdallah Al-Khatib on Cannes (ACID program)-Selected Documentary Little Palestine (Diary of a Siege)
A movie could be made out of the making of Abdallah Al-Khatib’s heartbreakingly poetic Little Palestine (Diary of a Siege), screening in the ACID program at this year’s Cannes. The film’s title refers to Yarmouk, a district in Damascus that served as the largest Palestinian refugee camp in the world from 1957 until its destruction in 2018. In 2013 the Al-Assad regime set up a siege, depriving Yarmouk’s residents of food, medicine and electricity while haphazardly dropping barrel bombs on what it deemed a rebel stronghold. An accidental filmmaker, Al-Khatib—born and bred in Yarmouk until ISIS expelled him in 2015—was a […]
by Lauren Wissot on Jul 12, 2021
