The Latest from Cannes and Beyond

Denis has a film in competition this year, The Stars at Noon, and Lindon has taken lead roles in Denis’s Friday Night (2002), Bastards (2013), and this year’s Fire. Lindon will surely maintain his professional objectivity, but it might be worth noting that the last French jury president was Isabelle Huppert, and in 2009, her jury awarded Michael Haneke a second Palme d’Or for The White Ribbon. His first was for The Piano Teacher (2001), starring, of course, Best Actress winner Isabelle Huppert.

Joining Lindon on the jury are director (Passing) and actress (Christine) Rebecca Hall; producer and actress Deepika Padukone (Chhapaak); Noomi Rapace, the actress who broke through internationally as the first Lisbeth Salander in The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (2009); Jasmine Trinca, the director of the forthcoming Marcel! and the winner of an Un Certain Regard Best Actress award for her turn in Sergio Castellitto’s Fortunata (2017); writer and director Asghar Farhadi (A Separation, A Hero), who has not been found guilty of plagiarism, regardless of what you may have heard a few weeks ago; Ladj Ly, whose Les misérables won the Jury Prize in Cannes in 2019; Jeff Nichols, winner of the Critics’ Week Grand Prize for Take Shelter (2011); and Joachim Trier, whose The Worst Person in the World scored a Best Actress award for Renate Reinsve last year.

Omar Sy, the star of the hit Netflix series Lupin, first broke through in The Intouchables (2011), a buddy comedy directed by Olivier Nakache and Éric Toledano and an international box office smash. The art director on The Intouchables was Mathieu Vadepied, who now directs Sy, Alassane Diong, and Jonas Bloquet in Father & Soldier, which has been selected to open this year’s Un Certain Regard program. Set during the First World War, the story centers on two Senegalese riflemen—father and son—sent to the front to fight for France. The UCR jury will be presided over by director, actress and producer Valeria Golino and include director Debra Granik and actors Joanna Kulig, Benjamin Biolay, and Édgar Ramírez.

Among the nine short films selected earlier this week to compete for the Palme d’Or is A Short Story, a new fifteen-minute film from Bi Gan (Kaili Blues, Long Day’s Journey into Night). The Directors’ Fortnight, too, has unveiled its shorts program. Sergei Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin (1925) tells the story of the 1905 mutiny on a Russian warship, and in Radu Jude’s The Potemkinists, a sculptor is inspired by the sailors who received political asylum in Romania.

Our Criterion Channel program dedicated to the work of filmmaker and artist Elizabeth Subrin includes For Maria (2019), a short tribute to Maria Schneider, the actress who worked with Bernardo Bertolucci, Michelangelo Antonioni, and Jacques Rivette. Subrin’s new short, headed to the Directors’ Fortnight, is titled simply Maria Schneider, 1983.

The thirteenth Odesa International Film Festival, which was to have taken place in July in Ukraine’s third largest city—and of course, the port where the Battleship Potemkin sparked a revolution—will obviously not be able to proceed. As an expression of support for Ukrainian filmmakers, Karlovy Vary will screen a selection of their films during its fifty-sixth edition running from July 1 through 9. Prague’s Febiofest, opening tomorrow and running through May 4, may be a more modestly scaled event, but it has created a special section, Ukraine: Central Europe, and all proceeds from admissions will be donated to support humanitarian organizations and Ukrainian artists.

To return to Karlovy Vary, the festival is launching KVIFF Talents, a year-round program aimed at discovering and supporting emerging filmmakers. In the meantime, this year’s edition will feature a new restoration of Jaromil Jireš’s 1968 adaptation of Milan Kundera’s novel The Joke and a tribute to Bolek Polívka, the actor, playwright, screenwriter, and director known not only for his own work in theater and cinema but also for his many collaborations with Věra Chytilová.

A couple of weeks ago, Locarno announced that it would present an honorary Golden Leopard to Kelly Reichardt. On Tuesday, the festival revealed the winner of this year’s Vision Award, multidisciplinary artist Laurie Anderson. The news comes just days after the fortieth anniversary of the release of Anderson’s landmark debut album, Big Science. During its seventy-fifth edition running from August 3 through 13, Locarno will screen two features Anderson has directed, Home of the Brave (1986) and Heart of a Dog (2015).

Finally for now, Sundance has unveiled the biggest lineup yet for its London edition running from June 9 through 12. Among the selections are Sara Dosa’s Fire of Love, the winner of an editing award at Sundance in January—it’s screening today and tomorrow at New Directors/New Films in New York—and Andrew Semans’s Resurrection, starring Cannes 2022 jury member Rebecca Hall.