You have to love Spike Lee for crashing Thierry Frémaux’s insiders party at the line-up press conference… via social media of course!
Thierry Frémaux, the General Delegate of the Festival de Cannes, announced an extensive number of titles during the line up press conference on the morning of April 10th, at the UGC Montparnasse cinema in Paris, accompanied by festival president Iris Knobloch.
While reading his last title in Competition, he joked that he had been getting messages about not announcing one particular title, but that it would come at a later date. The festival likes to drop those kinds of luxurious breadcrumbs for the media and cinema lovers, all through the next month until Cannes kicks off on May 13th.
That title, it turns out, must have been Spike Lee’s latest joint, Highest 2 Lowest, a thriller, English-language reinterpretation of Akira Kurosawa's 1963 Japanese film High and Low, starring Denzel Washington, Jeffrey Wright and rapper ASAP Rocky.
So Lee took to Instagram and made the announcement himself.
Soon after, Deadline and other publications had the news published as confirmed, with Lee also posting that on his Insta page. And Cannes made a kind of “oops” admission which they also posted on Instagram. One has to love journalism in the age of social media!
But back to cinema in the traditional sense. During the press conference, the titles announced by Frémaux consisted of a mixture of expected participants and unexpected films.
Cannes favorites in the main Competition include the latest from the Dardenne Brothers, Wes Anderson, Richard Linklater and Joachim Trier, but also Julia Ducournau. The Titane filmmaker is one of six women filmmakers out of the total 19 titles competing for the Palme d’Or. The other five are Kelly Reichardt, Hafsia Herzi, Carla Simon, Chie Hayakawa and Mascha Schilinski.
The festival received more than 2,900 submissions this year, a record according to Frémaux.
Exiled Egyptian filmmaker Tarik Saleh returns to the Competition with Eagles of the Republic, the third installment of his Cairo trilogy, after The Nile Hilton Incident and Cairo Conspiracy, which was called Boy From Heaven when it screened in Cannes in 2022.
Brazilian veteran Kleber Mendonça Filho returns to Cannes with The Secret Agent, starring Wagner Moura — and Walter Salles hinted at the film’s participation during his masterclass in Doha recently.
Another returning auteur is Iranian director Jafar Panahi, who returns with a surprise title no one anticipated on their pre-Cannes lists, titled A Simple Accident.
Mario Martone’s Fuori is a film which allows Valeria Golino to embody the character of an Italian writer she has helped TV lovers to rediscover. It is that of Goliarda Sapienza, the writer of the Sicilian novel The Art Of Joy. Golino’s two part version of the story recently played at London’s Ciné Lumière ahead of streaming on Sky and it world premiered in Cannes last year. Martone’s previous narrative film Nostalgia screened in Cannes’s Competition in 2022.
Richard Linklater has been a busy boy as he recently premiered Blue Moon at this year’s Berlinale in February and now will present the French-language Nouvelle Vague, about the making of Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless, and starring Zooey Deutch.
Also expected in Cannes, thanks to the insight by another Qumra master in Doha this year, the DoP Darius Khondji, is US director Ari Aster’s dark comedy Western Eddington, starring Joaquin Phoenix, Pedro Pascal and Emma Stone.
French director Hafsia Herzi’s La Petite Derniere is an adaptation of Fatima Daas’ novel by the same name and is described as a coming-of-age story set in a Paris suburb featuring a lesbian Muslim woman.
Already announced was Tom Cruise starrer Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning which will screen on Wednesday the 14th, Out of Competition. In the film, Cruise’s Ethan Hunt, who he has portrayed since the beginning of the franchise in 1996, and his IMF team ask you to trust them one last time.
In Un Certain Regard, there are some wonderful titles, perhaps even more of a discovery than in the Cannes Competition. Among them, and photographed in the header above, Promised Sky (formerly known as Marie & Jolie) by Erige Sehiri, her follow up to the critically acclaimed 2021 title Under the Fig Trees. The kind, talented and classy Sehiri sat down with me in Doha, as I was assigned as the project’s press mentor, though honestly, the Tunisian French director doesn’t need any help when it comes to meeting the media! She is as radiant and smart as she is beautiful. And her cinema is just a wondrous extension of that. The film portrays three women from Ivory Coast, well, three and a half really, as they try to find a new life in Tunis, a place rife with prejudice. The little girl in the film will melt your heart, hence the “half” comment.
Along with Sehiri’s masterpiece, two actors make their directorial debut in this year’s Un Certain Regard line up. They are Scarlett Johansson and Harris Dickinson. Johansson directed Eleanor The Great starring June Squibb as a 90-year-old woman — let’s give this woman a Golden Globe this year! — who is trying to rebuild her life after the death of her best friend.
And Dickinson, who has starred in Cannes Palme d’Or winner Triangle Of Sadness and more recently made Nicole Kidman drink milk in Babygirl, will unveil Urchin, a film he also wrote about a homeless man who struggles to integrate into society. The film stars British theater, film and TV actor Frank Dillane and features Egyptian actor Amr Waked.
This year’s Jury President is French actress Juliette Binoche. For the full line up, check out the Festival de Cannes website.
Top image courtesy of the filmmaker, used with permission.