Cannes 2018 Preview

Cannes 2018

Cannes International Film Festival
8-19 May 2018
Cannes, France
Cannes website

The Cannes Film Festival is planning to shake things up a bit during its 71st edition.

When the official festival line-up was announced last month, a sigh went through the crowd. Not only had Netflix been barred from this year’s Official Competition, but what’s worse was the repeatedly low number of female directors on display – only three out of 21 this time, undoubtedly a meagre result.

However, despite these obvious omissions and shortfalls, the selection remains promising: Among the 21 selected films competing for the Palme d’Or are new films from It Follows director David Robert Mittchell (Under the Silver Lake), Eva Husson (Girls of the Sun), Jean-Luc Godard (The Image Book), Alice Rohrwacher (Happy as Lazzaro), Jia Zhang-ke (Ash is Purest White) and Hirokazu Kore-eda (Shoplifters). It was also recently announced that Solo: A Star Wars Story will premiere on 15 May at Cannes – 10 days before the movie’s anticipated official opening. Plus, with a bunch of new regulations for press screenings and premieres, Cannes is certainly planning to shake things up a bit during its 71st edition.

Opening the festival tonight will be Asghar Farhadi’s Spanish-language psychological thriller Everybody Knows, starring starring Penélope Cruz, Javier Bardem and Ricardo Darín, and it will be interesting to see if the Iranian director has handled the jump to a different language and location well enough to still intrigue audiences in the same way as he did with his earlier work.

Another title to look forward to is Cold War, the new film by Pawel Pawlikowski, which revolves around a love story between two mismatched people in Poland during the cold war of the 1950s. And then, of course, there is Spike Lee’s BlacKkKlansman, which brings this director to Cannes for the first time since 1991, when he was at the festival with Jungle Fever. His latest offering is produced by Get Out director Jordan Peele and depicts the real-life story of Ron Stallworth, a black police officer who went undercover in 1978 to infiltrate the Ku Klux Klan.

For anyone interested in casting the net a little wider than the Official Competition, the festival’s sub-section Un Certain Regard this year focuses on films by daring but perhaps less established filmmakers, while the always exciting Directors’ Fortnight (programmed by the French Directors Guild) is also often the place were avant-garde and up-and-coming directors are spotted.

Pamela Jahn

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Check out the full line-up of the Official Selection below.

Competition

At War – Stéphane Brizé
Asako I & II – Ryusuke Hamaguchi
Ash Is Purest White – Jia Zhangke
Burning – Lee Chang-dong
Blackkklansman – Spike Lee
Capharnaüm – Nadine Labaki
Cold War – Pawel Pawlikowski
Dogman – Matteo Garrone
Everybody Knows – Asghar Farhadi
Girls of the Sun – Eva Husson
Happy as Lazzaro – Alice Rohrwacher
The Image Book – Jean-Luc Godard
Knife + Heart – Yann Gonzalez
Ayka – Sergey Dvortsevoy
Sorry Angel – Christophe Honoré
Shoplifters – Hirokazu Koreeda
Summer – Kirill Serebrennikov
3 Faces – Jafar Panahi
Under the Silver Lake – David Robert Mitchell
The Wild Pear Tree – Nuri Bilge Ceylan
Yomeddine – A.B Shawky

Out of Competition

Solo: A Star Wars Story – Ron Howard
Le Grand Bain – Gilles Lellouche

Un Certain Regard

Sextape – Antoine Desrosières
El angel – Luis Ortega
Border – Ali Abbasi
Euphoria – Valeria Golino
The Gentle Indifference of the World – Adilkhan Yerzhanov
Girl – Lukas Dhont
Angel Face – Vanessa Filho
In My Room – Ulrich Köhler
Long Day’s Journey into Night – Bi Gan
Manto – Nandita Das
My Favorite Fabric – Gaya Jiji
Rafiki (Friend) – Wanuri Kahiu
The Harvesters – Etienne Kallos

Midnight Screenings

Arctic – Joe Penna
Gongjak (The Spy Gone North) – Yoon Jong-bing

Special Screenings

To the Four Winds – Michel Toesca
Le Grand Cirque mystique – Carlo Diegues
Dead Souls – Wang Bing
Pope Francis: A Man of His Word – Wim Wenders
The State against Mandela and the Others – Nicolas Champeaux and Gilles Porte
Ten Years in Thailand – Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Wisit Sasanatieng, Aditya Assarat, Chookiat Sakveerakul and Chulayarnnon Siriphol
La Traversée – Romain Goupil

For more information on the full line-up, visit the Cannes website.