The Cannes Film Festival, that annual jamboree and the most important film festival in the world, is nearly upon us. Now that the dust over the programme announcements has settled, let’s take a look at what the world can expect to watch over the next year or so. The festival opens safely enough with Woody Allen’s Café Society , starring Kristen Stewart and Jesse Eisenberg, and moves on to out-of-competition screenings of Shane Black’s The Nice Guys , starring Ryan Gosling and Russell Crowe, Steven Spielberg’s The BFG , starring Rebecca Hall and Mark Rylance, and Jodie Foster’s Money Monster , starring Julia Roberts and George Clooney. Other usual heavy-hitter suspects in the competition include films by Olivier Assayas, Pedro Almodovar, Andrea Arnold, Ken Loach, the Dardenne Brothers, Jim Jarmusch, Brillante Mendoza, Cristian Mungiu, Park Chan-wook and Nicolas Winding Refn, amongst others.
We’ll get to watch the Hollywood films soon and easily enough — The Nice Guys , for example, is getting an India release on May 27 — and the films by the big names of world cinema will soon be at a festival near us; so what really piques my interest is the number of newer voices on display at the Cannes Un Certain Regard section. Of the lot, the one I’m looking forward to the most is Egyptian director Mohamed Diab’s Eshtebak (Clash). The press note the filmmakers sent to me after the Cannes selection reads thus: “The film tackles the state of political unrest that prevailed in Egypt following the removal of President Morsi from power. Written by Khaled Diab and Mohamed Diab, who is also the director, the film is a joint production between France, Egypt, Germany, and the UAE. Most of the film takes place in an 8m police truck packed with 25 both pro and anti-Muslim Brotherhood demonstrators, where the characters interact in a plot full of madness, violence, romance and comedy.” Which only begs the question, where do I sign up?
Another Un Certain Regard selection I’m looking forward to is Boo Junfeng’s Apprentice , about the blossoming friendship between a Malay prison officer and the jail’s Chinese executioner. I am a great admirer of the director’s earlier film Sandcastle (2010) and also his segment in the portmanteau film 7 Letters. Stéphanie Di Giusto’s The Dancer is on a subject that has fascinated me for decades — the venerable Parisian music hall Folies Bergère that has stood the test of time from the 1890s. The film looks at the complicated relationship between Loïe Fuller and her protégé and rival Isadora Duncan. In Kôji Fukada’s Harmonium , an ex-jailbird, who has been given shelter in a friend’s garage, begins interfering in his family life, though whether it will be to the extent as seen in Renoir’s Boudu Saved From Drowning (1932) remains to be discovered.
Being in my profession, prior knowledge of films are often a curse and a deterrent to subsequent enjoyment, but I’m happy to say that there is one Un Certain Regard selection this year that I have no prior knowledge of Francisco Márquez and Andrea Testa’s Argentinean film, Francisco Sanctis’ Long Night . Hopefully, the film will live up to the promise of the title.