The Cannes Film Festival This Monday the preparations are finalized for its 75th edition, which promises great stars on its red carpet, such as Tom Cruise, Kristen Stewart or Tom Hanks, but also a dose of news with the war in Ukraine.
“We’re going to make a big festival together, we are going to think a lot about cinema, but without stopping thinking about Ukraine,” said Thierry Frémaux, the festival’s general delegate, during a press conference.
The contest wants to turn the page on the pandemic, which forced it to cancel the 2020 edition and postpone the 2021 edition to the summer, and expects more than 35,000 people to participate, without mandatory maskin the most important film festival in the world.
The festival teams have this last day to finish the preparations in the luxurious town on the French Côte d’Azur, before rolling out the famous red carpet on Tuesday and giving the starting signal.
Countless stars of the seventh art will pass through it, such as Tom Cruise, who returns to his role as an aviator in the new version of “Top Gun”, and Tom Hanks, in the role of the manager of the king of rock’n’roll in “Elvis “.
Viggo Mortensen, Léa Seydoux and Kristen Stewart star in “Crimes of the future”, a story about organ mutations, the latest from Canadian David Cronenberg, in contention for the Palme d’Or.
Altogether 21 films will compete for the maximum awardwhich will be delivered by the jury chaired by French actor Vincent Lindon on May 28.
five female directors
Some of the filmmakers aspire to a new Palme d’Or, such as the Dardenne brothers (“Rosetta” and “El nino”) with “Tori et Lokita”, the Swedish Ruben Ostlund (“The square”) with “Triangle of sadness”, or the Japanese Hirokazu Kore-eda (“A family affair”), with “Broker”.
The Spanish Albert Serra competes with “Pacifiction”, a story of diplomatic espionage and nuclear tests in Tahiti.
The competition includes five directors – a record in the history of the contest – and one of them could take over from Julia Ducournau, who last year became the second woman to win the Palme d’Or with “Titane”.
The French Claire Denis presents “Stars at noon”, a torrid story set in Nicaragua in the 1980s, and the American Kelly Reichardt narrates the day-to-day life of an artist in “Showing up”.
The Russian Kirill Serebrennikov, known for his positions in favor of the LGBT+ community, returns to the competition with “Tchaikovsky”s wife”, about the tumultuous relationship between the Russian composer and his wife. filmmaker He could not travel to Cannes on the previous two occasions because he was convicted of diversion of money, in a case denounced as a political maneuver by his defenders.
Currently in exile, he recently told AFP the “horror, sadness, shame, pain” he felt at the invasion of Ukraine.
posthumous film
Ukraine will also be present at Cannes with the help of several filmmakers from that country at war, such as veteran Sergei Loznitsa and new director Maksim Nakonechnyi, with a film set in the Donbas war, which broke out in 2014. The film will also be screened posthumous of the Lithuanian Mantas Kvedaravicius, who died in April in Mariúpol, whose images recorded there could have been compiled by his girlfriend.
At the Ibero-American level, two productions from Costa Rica are included in the official selection: “Domingo y la fog” by Ariel Escalante, within Un Certain Regard, and the short film “Luz noche”, by Kim Torres, which competes for the Palme d’Or .
Out of competition, the Chilean Patricio Guzmán will show his new documentary “My Imaginary Country”, about the social explosion in his country in 2019.
In the parallel sections, dedicated to new talents, two Colombian feature films (“La jauría” and “Un varón”) and “1976”, the first work behind the camera by Chilean actress Manuela Martelli, will be screened.
The Spanish Elena López Riera will present “El agua”, the portrait of a group of adolescents in a small town in suspense before a possible flood and the legend of a woman who mysteriously disappears.
