Cannes looks to the future of cinema

The Cannes festival is celebrating.

Thomas Osborne
Thomas Osborne
18 May 2022 Wednesday 07:09
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Cannes looks to the future of cinema

The Cannes festival is celebrating. They have been celebrating great cinema for 75 years, and in this very special edition everything refers to a more than expected normality. If two years ago the prestigious event had to be canceled due to the pandemic and in 2021 it borrowed some summer dates for an appointment marked by restrictions, this 2022 returns to the traditional days of May to welcome an event that says goodbye to the masks and serves both as a showcase for the best auteur cinema and as a red carpet for acclaimed Hollywood names, starting with a full-blown Tom Cruise, who will present Top gun: Maverick, a sequel to the mythical 1980s film Top gun , and will be honored on the Croisette for his entire career three decades after coming here for the first time with A Very Distant Horizon.

Anne Hathaway, Idris Elba, Tilda Swinton or Tom Hanks will be other figures that will monopolize the flashes of a festival that starts today with the zombie comedy Coupez! , by Michel Hazanavicius and which intends to “look to the future”, in the words of the general delegate, Thierry Frémaux. For this reason, next week it will host a symposium organized by Guillermo del Toro in which a group of directors from all over the world will debate the future of the profession.

A total of 21 titles are programmed in the official section, including Pacifiction , by Albert Serra. The Catalan will compete for the Palme d'Or after having participated in several parallel sections. In 2006 he was in the Directors' Fortnight with Cavalleria Honor. Two years later, his El cant dels ocells arrived at the Critics' Week, he presented La mort de Lluis XIV in a special session and three years ago he won the Un Certain Regard Special Jury Prize thanks to Liberté. Pacifiction is a Spanish-French co-production starring the actors Sergi López and Benoît Magimel that has not yet been distributed in Spain. The enfant terrible Serra thus takes over from Pedro Almodóvar, the last Spaniard to compete in Cannes in 2019 with Pain and Glory.

But it will not be the only national presence in these parts, since Rodrigo Sorogoyen proposes a disturbing rural thriller set in Galicia entitled As bestas and will be seen for the first time at Cannes Premières. El agua, feature film debut by Elena López Riera with a story about popular beliefs that state that some women are predestined to disappear every time there are floods, can also be seen in the Directors' Fortnight. And more Spanish filmmakers, Estíbaliz Urresola and Anna Fernández de Paco, will show their short films Cuerdas and Nisam je stigao voljeti at the 61st Critics' Week. On the other hand, Rossy de Palma will be in charge of presiding over the jury of the Camera of Gold, destined to extol young talents.

The official section will be chaired by French actor Vincent Lindon, co-star of Titane, the controversial film by Julia Ducournau that won the Palme d'Or last year. Along with Asghar Farhadi, Jasmine Trinca, Joachim Trier, Noomi Rapace, Jeff Nichols, Ladj Ly, Rebecca Hall and Deepika Padukone, the interpreter will evaluate the 21 films, among which are the latest from James Gray ( Armageddon Time ) or Park Chan Wook ( Decision to leave ) and the works of four filmmakers who already know what it is to win the highest award: the Dardenne brothers, who present Tori and Lokita ; the Swedish Ruben Östlund, who will come with Triangle of sadness, a satire of the upper echelons; The Japanese Hirokazu Kore-eda participates with Broker , a drama about abandoned babies, and the Romanian Cristian Mungiu deals with the effects of European policies in Transylvania in RMN.

Undoubtedly, the main course will be served by veteran David Cronenberg with Crimes of the future, a futuristic thriller that marks his return to Cannes eight years after Maps to the stars and which features his favorite actor, Viggo Mortensen, Kristen Stewart and Léa Seydoux. . If the previous year there were four women who opted for the Palme d'Or, this 2022 there are five: Claire Denis (Stars at noon); Kelly Reichardt (Showing up), Leonor Serraille (Un petit frère), Valeria Bruni Tedeschi and Charlotte Vandermeersch.

Out of competition, Baz Luhrmann will present Elvis, which explores the life and music of Elvis Presley through his complicated relationship with his manager, Tom Parker. There will be more music with Ethan Coen and his documentary on Jerry Lee Lewis, and Brett Morgen will give David Bowie fans a good time with Moonage daydream.

Series are also welcome this year, and Cannes will host the preview of Irma Vep , by Oliver Assayas, with Alicia Vikander for HBO, and Esterno notte , by Marco Bellocchio, about the Red Brigades.


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