But even if the war in Iran was in a momentary lull, it left a void, not just of Iranian films (the only one of note in the program was Asghar Farhadi’s very French Parallel Tales starring a wickedly amusing Isabelle Huppert), but of the many Iranian journalists, sales companies and movie people who were almost entirely absent – just as some Israeli regulars missed the festival for the first time in decades. Yet there were also attempts to react positively in the face of the Mideast conflict, notably the efforts made by the Egyptian film industry to attract attention, for the second year, to the Egyptian pavilion with a rich program of guests, panels and events, including promotion of the Cairo Film Festival and the El Gouna Film Festival coming up in the fall. And for the 10th year running, the Arab Cinema Center hosted its International Critics’ Awards on the beach, a glamorous but serious event that focused a needed spotlight on the MENA region. Winner of the Best Feature Film was the Palestinian dramedy Once Upon a Time in Gaza directed by brothers Arab and Tarzan Nasser.

THE FRENCH PROTESTS

Meanwhile at Cannes, nine years after the Netflix controversy that led to a change in festival rules (specifically, films that don’t commit to a regular theatrical release in France won’t be eligible for Competition slots), streamers were once again booed when their logos appeared in the opening credits of French films. Perhaps the people protesting were not aware that, by law, streaming services operating in France must invest in local productions. It was in marked contrast to the audiences’ habit of indiscriminately applauding all other logos, which has gotten so out of hand that one journalist actually yelled, “Production companies are not your friends!” at the start of a press screening in the Debussy theater.

This situation escalated further due to an ongoing protest involving Canal+ and its majority shareholder Vincent Bolloré, whose growing influence in the film industry is viewed with concern in some progressive quarters. An open letter objecting to this, with signatures both French and international (Javier Bardem and Ken Loach among them), led to Canal+ CEO Maxime Saada declaring the company would never work with any of those people again. As a result, the Canal+ logo (present in most French films shown at the festival) was met with derision and disapproval for the entire second week of the event.

THE FILMS

The festival competition itself was surprisingly diversified in themes and approaches, packing in unabashed genre films never seen before in Cannes’ main section and a lot of WW2 history redux, along with highbrow art films running way over two hours that tested the patience. Yet the film that captured the critics’ hearts and remained for many the most engrossingly conceived, shot and acted was the 82-minute Fatherland, Pawel Pawlikowski’s wrenching snapshot of history when, in 1949, Nobel Prize-winning writer Thomas Mann traveled through a newly divided Germany with his adult daughter Erika. Actors Sandra Huller and Hanns Zischler perform a pungent, illuminating dance around the big issues of the time in an extremely resonant work.

Another memorable film that tied a personal story of jealousy and murder into a historical moment was Minotaur, set in 2022 when military reservists were being drafted in Russia to fight and quite possibly die in Ukraine. Andrei Zviaguintsev’s thought-provoking tale of unpunished crime invokes Putin’s lawless regime and the immoral acquiescence of the middle class at every turn. The jury recognized it with the Grand Prix.

Nailing the Palme d’Or for the second time after his abortion drama 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days wore the crown in 2007, Romanian director Cristian Mungiu decries the official abuse of power and religious intolerance, only here it is progressive, secular, humanist Norwegian culture that destroys a half-Romanian Evangelical family with five children in the name of protecting the kids. There is nothing strikingly insightful but the high-stakes drama keeps you watching, which should be a green light for release (perhaps along with an unrecognizable Sebastian Stan playing the father.)

Building on past Cannes breakout sensations like Parasite, Titane and The Substance, this was a strong year for genre cinema on the Croisette. Elevated horror, sci-fi and fantasy thriller tropes were well represented across all festival sections. Indeed, perhaps the most incongruous film ever to gatecrash the prestigious art-house zone of the main competition was Na Hong-jin’s Hope, a shallow but hugely enjoyable gonzo action comedy epic about alien monsters invading a small town, and reportedly the most expensive production in South Korean history. Also competing for the Palme d’Or was Arthur Harari’s haunting drama The Unknown (L’Inconnue), starring Lea Seydoux, which uses its cryptic body-swap horror premise as a lens to explore identity and alienation, and The Birthday Party (Histoires de la Nuit) by Léa Mysius, a tense home invasion thriller co-starring Monica Belucci, which clothes its pulpy plot in glossy, stylish trimmings.

A disappointing note in this year’s main competition was sub-par work by veteran auteurs with a previously strong Cannes track record. Both Asghar Farhadi’s Parallel Tales (Histoires Paralleles) and Pedro Almodóvar’s Bitter Christmas (Amarga Navidad) were meta-textual chamber dramas about creative ethics and the tensions between fiction and reality, each reliably polished and well acted but ultimately low on spark. Even reliable Japanese director Koreeda Hirokazu’s reflection on an AI future, Sheep in the Box, that explores the possibility of giving the parents of dead children android replicants to replace them seemed on the slight side for such heavy subject matter. James Gray, one of the few American heavyweights in Cannes, also returned to very familiar ground with Paper Tiger, yet another ponderous rumination on fraternal tensions and organised crime in 1980s New York. Starring Adam Driver, Scarlett Johanssen and Miles Teller, this obstinately drab saga felt like it was scripted by an AI program trained entirely on earlier, better James Gray movies.

It was a year when LGBTQ stories were very prominent in the program, especially outside the main competition. Opening the Un Certain Regard section to generally warm reviews — and winning the Queer Palme — was Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma by Jane Schoenbrun, an ambitiously weird candy-coloured queer fantasia which uses vintage slasher-movie conventions to unlock its underlying theme of sexual self-awakening. But the main UCR prize ultimately went to Sandra Wollner’s Everytime, a family psychodrama about grief and loss which skips into a Twilight Zone of time loops and ghostly echoes in its poignant final act. The Midnight section also threw up a few superior genre gems including French writer-director Marion Le Corroller’s debut feature Species (Sanguine), a savagely dark comedy thriller that turns workplace exploitation into a blood-soaked body-horror nightmare.

Animation had a strong presence across most sections of the festival, with nine feature films spread between the Critics’ Week, Directors Fortnight, Un Certain Regard, Special Screenings and Midnight Screenings. The latter hosted the world premiere of Jim Queen, a gloriously queer comedy where a mysterious virus causes gay men to become straight. Above all, it was a triumph for hand-drawn worlds, be it the stylized take on a celebrated opera (Carmen by Sébastien Laudenbach) or the classically elegant French-language adaptation of a British book (Lucy Lost by Olivier Clert). And while the short film competition was marked by the triumph of the Mexican-Chilean live-action work For the Opponents, the warmest reaction from the crowd was for the Swedish stop-motion dark comedy The End, the latest sterling example of Niki Lindroth von Bahr’s knack for getting great results out of funny-looking anthropomorphic animals.

Another major theme was France dealing with its past, specifically World War II, revisited in three films: Moulin focused on Resistance leader Jean Moulin and his tension-filled interactions with Gestapo officer Klaus Barbie; A Man of His Time explored the other end of the spectrum, with director Emmanuel Marre taking inspiration from his great-grandfather to delve into the inner workings of the Vichy regime; and then, as the main Out of Competition event of this edition (and the de facto French blockbuster of the year once it releases in cinemas next month), De Gaulle: Tilting Iron (the first half of a two-film epic) brought the house down as viewers were reminded of the passion Charles De Gaulle brought to the effort of liberating France.

A BOLD DIRECTORS’ FORTNIGHT

If We Are Aliens left Cannes empty-handed, it was not for its want of quality or lack of audience appreciation. The animation, which explores the impact of an unravelling childhood friendship on two young men, received rapturous applause at each of its screenings (including on the final day, with a markedly younger audience due to special passes for under-25’s).

Directors’ Fortnight was perhaps one of the most audacious and diverse in recent years. On the one hand, it featured the return of many festival veterans who have a long history with the independent programme. Alain Cavalier, 93, sent in what would most probably his final (and very, very funny) testimony about cinema with the diary-essay documentary Thanks For Coming. After years away over at the other end of the Croisette racing for the Palme d’Or, Bruno Dumont showed up at the Fortnight with Red Rocks, a summertime drama about romance and rivalry starring children; he also delivered a masterclass full of insights about the very different creative decisions needed to accommodate his very young cast.

With devastatingly moving performances from her twenty-something actors, Clio Barnard’s third Fortnight entry I See Buildings Fall Like Lightning – about the diverging fortunes of five longtime friends from the same defunct housing estate in Birmingham – was the winner of the Fortnight’s People’s Choice Awards. Camaraderie also yields chemistry in French filmmaker Lila Pinell’s Shana, about a young woman counting on the support and protection of her circle of girlfriends as she confronts the return of a newly paroled, abusive ex.

Another pleasant surprise at the Fortnight this year was Sarah Arnold’s taboo-busting, genre-shifting Too Many Beasts. Revolving around an emotionally scarred Corsican cop’s professional and personal alliance with a no-nonsense police psychiatrist as they investigate “eco-terrorist” attacks in a small farm town, the film offered a wild reworking of the tropes worn so increasingly thin in recent years in rural-set, social realist French dramas. With its surreal narrative and a no-holds-barred satire about backward provincialism and patriarchy, the Paris-based Italian-Swiss Arnold offered hopes for French comedy after the catastrophically staid festival-opener The Electric Kiss.

JAPAN TAKES CENTER STAGE

By choosing Japan as its country of honor this year, the Cannes Film Market made a rare alignment with the film festival itself. After France, Japan was probably the most omnipresent country on the Croisette this year, with a wide range of its filmmakers – from long-dead auteurs to first-time directors – casting a very large shadow over the festival.

 Apart from securing a whopping three nominations in the main competition (and an ex-aequo award to Hamaguchi’s actresses Virginie Efira and Tao Okamoto in All of a Sudden), Japan also boasted a film in Un Certain Regard (Yukiko Sode’s All the Lovers in the Night, starring Tadanobu Asano of Thor fame). Cult cineaste Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s period suspense thriller The Samurai and the Prisoners screened in the Cannes Première programme; Kohei Kadowaki’s completely un-Ghibli animation drama We Are Aliens in Directors’ Fortnight; and a restoration of the late Akira Kurosawa’s 1943 debut Sanshiro Sugata appeared in Cannes Classics.

Japan was also fertile ground for two young non-Japanese filmmakers. Chinese student director Wong Chau-hong’s short film Will It Rain Again Today was produced by Nihon University College of Art in Tokyo and competed for La Cinef. In Un Certain Regard, Greek director Konstantina Kotzamani presented her first feature Titanic Ocean, a film set in a fictional Japanese institution where young women train to become professional mermaid performers.

FEATURE FILMS COMPETITION

PALME D’OR for Best Film to:
Fjord
directed by Cristian Mungiu

GRAND PRIX to:
Minotaur
directed by Andrei Zviaguintsev

JURY PRIZE to:
The Dreamed Adventure
directed by Valeska Grisebach

BEST DIRECTOR  ex-aequo to:
Javier Calvo, Javier Ambrossi
for the film The Black Ball
and
Pawel Pawlikowski
for the film Fatherland

BEST PERFORMANCE BY AN ACTOR to:
Emmanuel Macchia and Valentin Campagneshare
for the film Coward
directed by Lukas Dhont

 BEST PERFORMANCE BY AN ACTRESS to:
Tao Okamoto and Virginie Efira
for the film All of a Sudden
directed by Hamaguchi Ryusuke

BEST SCREENPLAY to:
Emmanuel Marre
for A Man Of His Time

SHORT FILMS COMPETITION

PALME D’OR
The Opponents
by Federico Luis

UN CERTAIN REGARD

UN CERTAIN REGARD PRIZE to:
Everytime
by Sandra Wollner

CRITICS’ WEEK

GRAND PRIZE
La Gradiva
directed by Marine Atlan

DIRECTOR’S FORTNIGHT

AUDIENCE AWARD
I See Buildings Fall Like Lightning
directed by Clio Barnard

An obsession with porn is something typically associated with maladjusted men, and it is uncomfortable to imagine a woman sinking into the swamp of smutty videos. But does she deserve all this heat, which sounds so much like self-hatred? An off-screen narrator describes the young woman’s most intimate emotions and sexual feelings in an accusatory, highly moralistic tone, addressing her only as “you” and hammering away at the sleaziness and self-degradation of her addiction to erotic images. All the while, a rapid-fire collage of film posters and video covers flicker by, illustrating her gradual descent into hell. It is quite an extensive collection (obviously acquired in the pre-Internet days) for a woman who works in a supermarket. The first batch of respectable cult classics stretches back to Jaws, suggesting an armchair cinephile; then soft-core titles bleed into hard-core trash. “Repulsion freed you,” intones the narrator in that accusing voice, which would be comic if it wasn’t so deadly serious.

The gist of this visual litany of sins is that the protagonist, contaminated by perversion, has lost her life to escapism on the living room couch. She has also seriously jeopardized a middling-not-great relationship with “Y”, a man who loves her, to spend nights with the more sexually out-there “X”. The enticing covers of Italian and Japanese XXX-rated titles parade by so fast they are almost subliminal, and a true torture to decipher for the kind of film fans who will be the main audience at festivals.

Director, producer, editing: Marjorie Conrad
Screenwriters: B. Curran, Marjorie Conrad
Narrator: E. Gautier
Cinematography: B. Curran, J. McCarthy, John Tuthill, Marjorie Conrad
Sound: Marjorie Conrad, John Tuthill
Venue: Cannes Film Festival (Directors Fortnight)
In English
58 minutes

I See Buildings Fall Like Lightning is the first feature in five years by Barnard (The Selfish Giant, Ali & Ava), whose recent career focus has mostly been on prestige TV drama, notably the BBC crime thriller Sherwood and the Apple+ gothic mystery miniseries The Essex Serpent. Adapted from Kieran Goddard’s 2024 novel of the same name, the screenplay is by prize-winning Irish playwright Enda Walsh, who is currently enjoying a fruitful run of acclaimed literary adaptations following Small Things Like These (2024) and Die, My Love (2025). Goddard is credited as executive producer on this BBC Films production, which has just premiered to warm reviews in Cannes, winning the Audience Award in the Directors’ Fortnight section, an early pointer to healthy interest at future festivals and beyond.

Cole pays Rian, a former high-school no-hoper who has used skill, guile and money inherited from his late father to make his fortune as a property developer. He has now climbed the social ladder and uprooted to a deluxe skyscraper apartment in London, with an upper-class girlfriend who clearly finds his proletarian rawness an alluring novelty. All the same, Rian remains firmly attached to his roots, returning to Birmingham regularly to party with his old drinking and clubbing buddies: Patrick (Anthony Boyle) and Shiv (Lola Petticrew), married with kids, builder Conor (Daryl McCormack), who is supervising an apartment block project for Rian and soon to become a father himself, and Oli (Jay Lycurgo), a small-time drug dealer struggling to go straight and find a legal job.

Artfully peppered with dramatic archive footage of Birmingham high-rise apartment blocks being demolished, and time-lapse CCTV imagery of Rian’s new property project as it takes shape, I See Buildings Fall Like Lightning is rooted in an underlying political argument about the ongoing housing crisis in Britain, which has steep rental prices and a chronic shortage of affordable social housing, partly thanks to profit-driven private developers dominating the market for decades. Average house prices in big cities like London and Birmingham are now between eight and 12 times the local median annual wage, their widest disparity in over 150 years. Unlike their parents, millions of young people can only dream of buying their own homes.

It is Patrick, a disillusioned but still-defiant socialist firebrand, who most clearly articulates this view in the film, waxing lyrical about a lost golden age when governments invested in community welfare, and housing was seen as a social good not a commodity. If some of his speeches feel a little didactic, they ring true to Patrick’s character as a self-taught working-class intellectual trapped in a precarious low-wage job, increasingly angry that the egalitarian future he was promised in his youth never arrived. Underscoring this theme, Barnard ends the film with a closing dedication lifted directly from Goddard’s novel: “To public luxury, which is the only luxury that matters.”

The plotting in I See Buildings Fall Like Lightning can feel a little schematic, with major developments hinging on shock confessions of infidelity, marriages collapsing overnight, cheerful stoics conveniently becoming suicidal depressives, and so on. An aura of high-end soap opera hangs heavy in places. But helping to keep melodrama to a minimum is the easy chemistry and strong performances of the core cast, all non-locals making an impressive job of the distinctive, ultra-deadpan Birmingham accent.

Barnard shot in locations recommended by Goddard’s family, using real locals as extras, lending the film an extra layer of naturalism. Alongside Harry Escott’s lyrical score, a lively soundtrack of pop and dance music also captures the boozy, druggy euphoria these young people use to reinforce their friendship bonds as they enter the stormy seas of adulthood, with pleasingly prominent nods to Birmingham artists including The Streets and UB40.

Director: Clio Barnard
Cast: Anthony Boyle, Joe Cole, Jay Lycurgo, Daryl McCormack, Lola Petticrew
Screenplay: Enda Walsh, based on the novel by Keiran Goddard
Cinematography: Simon Tindall
Editing: Maya Maffioli
Music: Harry Escott
Producer: Tracy O’Riordan
Production company: Moonspun Films (UK)
World sales: Charades
Venue: Cannes Film Festival (Directors’ Fortnight)
In English
109 minutes

La leyenda del cine español Pedro Almodóvar continúa su etapa otoñal de trabajos decorosamente poco fuertes con Amarga Navidad, una reflexión profunda sobre la amistad, el proceso artístico y las complejidades éticas que la realización cinematográfica tiene en sí misma. Un raro caso de un estreno no mundial que logró un lugar en la competencia  de Cannes, este melodrama de bajo voltaje ya tuvo su estreno nacional en marzo, recibiendo críticas mixtas.

Por supuesto, siendo una película de Almodóvar Amarga Navidad sigue estando bellamente manicurada  y exquisitamente estilizada, mostrando más destreza visual y  humor irónico que la mayoría de las aspirantes a la Palma de Oro. Pero da la sensación de que el auteur de 76 años se repite con una pieza de autoficción en tono menor que demasiadas veces  se desliza en piloto automático. Curzon ha firmado los derechos para Reino Unido e Irlanda, mientras que los socios habituales del director en Estados Unidos, Sony Picture Classics, cubren América del Norte.

Tras una serie de proyectos en inglés, destacando su elegantemente  sombrío drama de muerte asistida The Room Next Door (2024), la primera película de Almodóvar en su lengua materna en cinco años le devuelve a algunos temas familiares de esta etapa de su carrera. De hecho, Amarga Navidad casi parece un semi-remake de su éxito crítico y comercial galardonado, Dolor y gloria  (2019). Ambos son retratos semi-autobiográficos de cineastas veteranos que reflexionan sobre el amor, la pérdida y la enmarañada relación entre el arte y la vida.

Amarga Navidad se plantea también como la película más autocrítica del peso pesado español hasta la fecha. Lo cual puede ser cierto pero, como gran parte de su obra posterior, también ofrece poco de la picardía lujuriosa, el humor negro y la anarquía queer de sus primeros trabajos. Por supuesto los artistas exitosos maduran inevitablemente hasta convertirse en un consejo de ancianos, pero la  restricción moderada nunca le ha sentado bien  a  Almodóvar. El precio de tener una voz autoral tan fuerte, hasta el punto de crear esencialmente tu propio género, es que siempre serás juzgado en función de tu fabuloso trabajo temprano.

Ampliada a partir de un relato corto escrito por el director hace muchos años, Amarga Navidad transcurre en el ya familiar Universo Cinematográfico de Almodóvar, con artistas angustiados que viven en apartamentos impecablemente amueblados en rincones bohemios adinerados de Madrid. La historia entrelaza dos tramas paralelas, que tienen lugar con 20 años de diferencia, con personajes y acontecimientos que se reflejan conscientemente entre sí.

En las escenas más contemporáneas, el director de cine gay mayor Raúl (Leonardo Sbaraglia), claramente un sustituto de Almodóvar, lucha con una baja de inspiración. Comienza a escribir un guion sobre otra cineasta, Elsa (Bárbara Lennie), un ejercicio de autoficción que cambia los géneros de los protagonistas pero que sigue siendo fuertemente autobiográfico. Estas primeras secciones transcurren en 2004, un año que Almodóvar considera clave para él, posiblemente debido a su éxito de taquilla meta-ficticio La mala educación  (2004), que también presentaba a un director protagonista en dificultades y numerosos hilos de flashback.

En una de las escenas más divertidas de la película, Elsa explica a una enfermera de hospital desconcertada que ella es una cineasta de “culto”, lo que significa que “a la mayoría de la gente no le gustan mis películas”. Aun así, disfruta de un estilo de vida lujoso gracias a la realización de anuncios de televisión y vive con un novio más joven y sexy, el atractivo Bonafacio (Patrick Criado), bombero y stripper ocasional.

Pero, al igual que Raúl, que vive con su hombre más joven Santi (Quim Gutiérrez), estas parejas no parecen estar bien empatadas ni intelectual ni emocionalmente. Tanto en las tramas “reales” como en las ficticias, Elsa y Raúl están rodeados de amigos cercanos que sufren tragedias familiares, duelos por shock y rupturas de relaciones, traumas privados que estos cineastas sin escrúpulos canibalizan sin pudor para sus guiones.

Amarga Navidad explora suavemente estas ideas en su episodio central, sin llegar nunca a convencernos del todo de que las ansiedades introspectivas de unos pocos artistas neuróticos adinerados son algo más que una montón de frijoles en el mundo real. Pero un crescendo dramático satisfactorio llega finalmente en el acto final, cuando la recientemente retirada y brutalmente honesta exasistente de Raúl, Mónica (Aitana Sánchez-Gijón), le reprende iracunda por ser un vampiro emocional, alimentándose egoístamente de las trágicas vidas de amigos, amantes y familiares sin su consentimiento.

Este, por mucho tiempo esperado, clímax es la parte más aguda de la película, un comentario autoficticio sobre la ética de la autoficción en sí, con Almodóvar intentando alcanzar algunas críticas de sí mismo. Sin tapujos, Mónica le dice a Raúl que se ha convertido en un consolidado artista complaciente, viviendo de su prestigio y bordeando un trabajo mediocre. Su nuevo largometraje, argumenta, será “una película menor pero tus seguidores la aceptarán.” Almodóvar seguramente sabe que esta crítica podría aplicarse igualmente a Amarga Navidad. Pero, por supuesto, diagnosticar el problema no es lo mismo que solucionarlo.

Disfrutada puramente como melodrama de lujo, Amarga Navidad tiene muchos elementos atractivos, incluyendo interpretaciones uniformemente sólidas, especialmente de Lennie y Sánchez-Gijon. El director de fotografía Pau Esteve Birba, el diseñador de producción Antxón Gómez y la directora artística Isabel Peinado también hacen un gran trabajo. La paleta visual, como siempre, es un lienzo precioso de vívidos tonos cítricos y modernismo Pop Art, mientras una breve subtrama rodada en Lanzarote aprovecha al máximo la impactante belleza extraterrestre de la isla. Varias canciones dolorosamente bellas de la legendaria cantante mexicana Chavela Vargas tienen un papel destacado, mientras que una exuberante partitura orquestal de jazz, compuesta por Alberto Iglesias, habitual de Almodóvar, añade una capa de opulencia sensorial. Es una película impecablemente confeccionada, aunque la tela se sienta un poco delgada.

Director, guionista: Pedro Almodóvar
Reparto: Bárbara Lennie, Leonardo Sbaraglia, Aitana Sánchez-Gijón, Victoria Luengo, Patrick Criado, Milena Smit, Quim Gutiérrez
Fotografía: Pau Esteve Birba
Edición: Teresa Font
Música: Alberto Iglesias
Diseñador de producción: Antxón Gómez
Director de arte: Isabel Peinado
Diseñador de vestuario: Paco Delgado
Productor: Agustín Almodóvar
Productora: El Deseo (España)
Ventas mundiales: Film Factory
Muestra: Festival de Cannes (Competencia)
 En español
112 minutos

A emotionally scarred woman returns to her native Venezuela after years of European exile, seeking some kind of reckoning with her late father and troubled past, in Death Has No Master. Premiered in the Directors’ Fortnight section in Cannes this week, the third feature by Canadian-based Venezuelan film-maker Jorge Thielen Armand is a brooding psychological revenge thriller, highly atmospheric but also ponderous and cryptic at times.

A four-country production, Death Has No Master sometimes suffers from the lost-in-translation feel that can afflict culturally mixed co-productions. In addition, Armand also seeks to make a mixture of various genres, which do not always cohere and may confuse some viewers. Even so, this is a spellbinding piece of work which makes great use of its striking location and eerie sound design to build a potent sense of dread and dislocation. It should play well with art-house genre fans and could enjoy specialist distribution in that market.

Caro (Asia Argento), a Venezuelan woman who has lived in Italy since childhood, returns to her former homeland with the intention of selling the grand but crumbling rural farmhouse she inherited from her semi-estranged father. She finds a very different country, and the once magnificent house now very deteriorated. The former family cook Sonia (Dogreika Tovar) and her 10-year-old son Maikol (Yermain Sequera) now live there and rent out rooms. When she refuses to leave, Roque (Jorge Thielen Hedderich), an old friend of the family, proposes unorthodox – but not entirely legal – methods for Caro to evict the squatters.

The plot alternates between the protagonist’s nightmares and reality, the former being only slightly more terrible and bloodier than the latter. Caro, a foreigner in her native country, does not show any sign of nostalgia, and is not willing to make any gracious concessions to Sonia. Argento, a talented actress, does her best dealing with a sullen role that does not even allow her to smile.

The film’s greatest accomplishment is its clammy, unsettling atmosphere of tropical decrepitude, invoking a rich cultural hinterland from Alejo Carpentier’s 1962 novel El siglo de las luces to the seething jungle-scapes of Apocalypse Now (1979). The house retains its majesty and part of its beauty, although it does not hide the bad years it has endured. The environment feels hot, humid, sticky. A very well-staged scene in a seedy bar even presents musicians playing out of tune. With the vibrant exception of a party with tropical percussion, the music feels dated, while an ever-present backdrop of ambient noise enhances this creeping sense of unease with excellent use of sound design.

Armand’s narrative intentions are never entirely clear. A thread of political drama, rooted in the class struggle between Caro and Sonia, devolves into a family melodrama defined more by the antipathy of the protagonist than her social background. There are moments that feel like a Western, but the plot veers more towards slasher horror, or maybe a giallo which fades to – guess the color – a Profundo Rosso. But despite a few stumbles, Death Has No Master ultimately delivers enough horror, suspense and blood to reward patient fans of cult genre cinema.

Director, screenwriter: Jorge Thielen Armand
Producer: Stefano Centini, Jorge Thielen Armand, Arantza Maldonado
Executive Producers: D.D. Wigley,  Yuki Arai, Mo Scarpelli
Cast: Asia Argento, Dogreika Tovar, Yermain Sequera, Jorge Thielen Hedderich, Arturo Rodríguez, Jericó Montilla, José “Chindito” Aponte
Cinematography: Luis Armando Arteaga
Editing: Felipe Guerrero
Music: Vittorio Giampietro
Production designer: Matías Tikas
Production company: La Faena (Venezuela/Canada), Volos Films (Italia), Faits Divers Media (Canada), in co-production with Tres Deal Productions; in association with The Godmother, Y.K. Well Enterprise, Lucky Number, Outpost MTL, Forerunner Films, Cinemateriales
World sales: Lucky Number
Venue: Cannes Film Festival (Quinzaine des Réalisateurs)
In Spanish, English
104 minutes

The story revolves around music sensation Maja (Marie Ulven, a real life singer – known as Girl in Red – making her feature acting debut), who one day experiences a mental breakdown that effectively puts her artistic career on indefinite hold. Overwhelmed by the pressures of fame and fandom, she returns to her hometown, under the watchful eye of her mother (Tone Mostraum), and gets a job as a substitute teacher to make ends meet. This new reality leads to dealing with depression, as well as new ways of self-discovery, with some help from colleagues and friends.

The title is thus an allusion to the sudden ordinariness of life now that Maja is no longer at the center of attention, and Ulven captures that sense of waywardness with naturalistic charm. Much like her character, she’s entering a world she may previously have had little familiarity with, and she rises to the challenge with a performance that displays layers of maturity which aren’t always found in someone so young (she’s in her late 20s) tasked with such an emotionally demanding role as their first proper acting job.

Much like Maja, she also receives priceless support from the other actors, including Joachim Trier regular Anders Danielsen Lie, who gets to indulge his funnier side as a fellow teacher who is obsessed with Michael Mann’s Heat (he shares the obsession with a friend called Oscar, played by Snorre Kind Monsson who was also the lead in the aforementioned Tits). Of course, Danielsen Lie’s performance is measured enough to avoid becoming far too broad when that topic is broached, and his recognizably understated intensity is also a helpful asset when it comes to defining the relationship between the characters, whose conversations strike the right balance between funny and emotionally potent.

Besides the actors, the star player is arguably the cinematographer Andreas Bjørseth, working with Landsvik for the third time. Through his eyes, the picture matches the inner turmoil of its protagonist, conveying the highs and lows of her life in a manner that highlights the sadness of her situation while also pointing out the value in those ordinary moments we may take for granted and overlook in a world where even the most basic attention spans are at risk of becoming a thing of the past. Paired with a carefully judged screenplay that handles a heavy topic head-on without slipping into misery porn territory, the visuals help create a cinematic reality where the low-key elements are the most valuable tools at the director’s disposal.

Director, Screenwriter: Eivind Landsvik
Cast: Marie Ulven Ringheim, Anders Danielsen Lie, Tone Mostraum, Embla Berntsen, Snorre Kind Monsson, Clara Dessau
Producers: Synnøve Hørsdal, Lotte Sandbu
Cinematography: Andreas Bjørseth
Production design: Sunniva Rostad
Music: Frederikke Hoffmeier, Bendik Hovik Kjeldsberg
Sound: Gisle Tveito, Kristoffer Endresen
Production companies: Maipo Film, Snowglobe
World sales: Salaud Morisset
Venue: Cannes Film Festival (Directors Fortnight)
In Norwegian
105 minutes

This portrait of an era unfolds with implacable deliberateness over a two and a half hours, as it explores the rise and fall of Henri Marre, an ambitious would-be leader of men who smooth-talks himself into a job in the Vichy machine. The leisurely pace is set by the regulated lives of civil servants and is likely to be off-putting for many, particularly non-Europeans who may struggle with the basic history that underlies the film. A tighter structure would probably have helped sustain interest.

The original French title is Notre salut (literally, Our Salvation), which is also the title of the book on modern government management self-published by one Henri Marre. He is vividly embodied with pushy self-confidence by Swann Arlaud (who played the lawyer in Anatomy of a Fall). Henri was, in fact, the director’s great-grandfather, and the wartime letters he exchanged with his wife Paulette (Sandrine Blancke) provide the story with a unique background realism.

Yet however intimate the letters may sound, the writer-director shows little interest in becoming the biographer of his ancestors. The net is cast much wider, with Henri a representative “man of his time” who is initially down on his luck, but whose belief in himself, persistence, and willingness – as he announces to a minister – to do absolutely anything in the service of his country, all conspire to get him attached to the ministry of unemployment. This becomes the viewer’s vantage point on how Vichy was run, with its nauseating “partnership” with Nazi Germany and all the attendant compromises this made necessary. These included thousands of workers who were allowed to be snatched by German military forces and transported to Germany as forced labor, piled up like cattle in overcrowded trucks. When one of the officials under Henri uses ministry funds to buy straw and chamber pots to ease the deportees’ horrible journey, he is fined for his compassion by our hero. “Those are the rules,” says Henri archly.

This is just the second feature directed by Emmanuel Marre and an ambitious leap in itself from his first film about a low-cost flight attendant, Zero Fucks Given, codirected by Julie Lecoustre. Working with D.P. Olivier Boonjing and production designer Anna Falguères, he recreates with dazzling verisimilitude France between 1940, when Germany occupied the north of the country and a “free zone” was established in the south supposedly governed by the French, and the Allied liberation in September 1944. While the officials in Vichy live well, Paulette and their three children suffer from hunger and cold, until Henri brings them to live with him. In one of the film’s rare uses of archive footage, huge crowds gather in the streets to salute Pétain. The excited faces look like something out of Leni Riefenstahl. But even the minor characters are carefully individualized, adding to a convincing period look and feel. A tip of the hat to costume designer Prunelle Rulens for Henri’s characteristic dandy look.

There are a few odd moments when the illusion breaks, generally because a modern song is injected or, in a party at the mayor’s house, when Paulette leads the guests in a dance that may or may not be from the Forties, but feels contemporary. The scene is more an expression of freedom on Paulette’s part, which in itself seems unusual in the conservative context, but Sandrine Blancke carries off small acts of rebellion well. As Henri, Arlaud is consistently subordinate to his wife’s strong opinions. It echoes his extreme ethical flexibility on the job. Decision by decision, his survivor’s instinct takes him deeper into following the bosses’ orders, which eventually include building labor camps for foreign workers and excluding Jews from jobs for the “French”.

It’s no spoiler to say Vichy ended with the Allied victory; the American landing in Normandy was a turning point that sent officials like Henri scrambling for cover. The film ends with a mystery, however, and there is no sense of closure, only a little boy for whom the past and future do not exist.

Director, screenwriter: Emmanuel Marre
Producers: Sébastien Andres, Alice Lemaire, Alexandre Perrier
Cast: Swann Arlaud, Sandrine Blancke, Jean-Baptiste Marre, Harpo Guit, Mathieu Perotto, Mathilde Abd-el-Kader
Cinematography:  Olivier Boonjing
Production design: Anna Falguères
Costume design: Prunelle Rulens
Editing: Nicolas Rumpl
Sound: Antoine Bailly
Production companies: Michigan Films (Belgium), Kidam (France) in association with Condor Distribution, Les Films Oelleas, Unité, Les Films de Pierre (France), Orange Proximus (Belgium), The Ink Connection, Be TV (Belgium), France 2 Cinéma, RTBF (Belgium)
World sales: Charades
Venue: Cannes Film Festival (Competition)
In French
155 minutes

La trama se alterna con las pesadillas de la protagonista, más terribles y sangrientas que la realidad. Caro, una extranjera en su país natal, no da muestra alguna de nostalgia, no está dispuesta a tener un gesto de amabilidad. Asia Argento una actriz talentosa, hace un esfuerzo con un papel que no le permite ni sonreír.

Un gran acierto de la película es la atmósfera de decrepitud tropical. Una mezcla de Apocalipse Now (1979) con el siglo de las luces de Alejo Carpentier. La casa conserva su majestuosidad y parte de su belleza aunque no niega los malos años que ha pasado. L ambiente se siente caliente, húmedo, pegajoso. Una escena muy bien montada en un bar de mala muerte, recrea incluso a los músicos fuera de tono. La música, con la vibrante excepción de una fiesta con percusiones tropicales, se siente anticuada, aunque la inclusión de ruidos ambientales apoya al diseño sonoro.

La muerte no tiene dueño es la tercera película del venezolano residente en Canadá Jorge Thielen Armand, una producción entre cuatro países. Además de las concesiones que esto implica, el director quiso hacer una mezcla de generos que no siempre funciona y confunde al público potencial. El posible drama político con lucha de clases, deriva en un melodrama familiar recrudecido por la antipatía de la protagonista y no por su origen. Hay momentos de western, pero la narración va directo hacia el horror slasher, o quizá Giallo,  que se funde en una pantalla, ¿qué más podría ser? Profundo Rosso.

A pesar de sus tropiezos hay en, La muerte no tiene dueño, suficiente horror, y sangre, para interesar a los fanáticos del género y tener buena distribución en ese mercado.

Director, guion: Jorge Thielen Armand
Productor: Stefano Centini, Jorge Thielen Armand, Arantza Maldonado
Productores ejecutivos: D.D. Wigley,  Yuki Arai, Mo Scarpelli
Reparto: Asia Argento, Dogreika Tovar, Yermain Sequera, Jorge Thielen Hedderich, Arturo Rodríguez, Jericó Montilla, José “Chindito” Aponte
Fotografía: Luis Armando Arteaga
Edición: Felipe Guerrero
Música: Vittorio Giampietro
Diseño de producción: Matías Tikas
Compañías productoras: La Faena (Venezuela), Volos Films (Italia), Faits Divers Media (Canadá), en co-producción con Tres
Deal Productions; asociados con The Godmother, Y.K. Well Enterprise, Lucky Number, Outpost MTL, Forerunner Films, Cinemateriales
Ventas internacionales: Lucky Number
Muestra: Cannes Film Festival (Quinzaine des Réalisateurs)
In español
106 minutos

But Minotaur is much more than a twisted bedroom tale. Making it topical are its constant references to the “partial mobilization” of Russia’s military reservists, who are being rounded up to fight another war in Ukraine. Against a quiet background drumbeat that keeps returning to the soundtrack, the political subtext affords audiences a glimpse into a country that has been banned from film festivals for years, greatly enriching this multi-country coproduction.

Directed by the esteemed Andrei Zviaguintsev, it shares the writer-director’s deep love of nature with films like The Return, the 2003 Golden Lion winner in Venice in which a father takes his sons on a fishing trip through the Russian wilderness, and his 2014 Leviathan set among fishermen in a coastal town, awarded Best Screenplay in Cannes. The new film is very much set within a natural world, filled with denatured people. It opens with a shot of water rippling on a wide and windy lake, a short walk through the woods to the Morozov family’s modern, open-space home.

But there is trouble in this natural paradise. Galina (Iris Lebedeva), the beautiful young wife, resentfully takes brusque orders from her husband Gleb (Dmitriy Mazurov), a self-centered company owner whose aggressive posturing and passing resemblance to Elon Musk do nothing to make him likable. Only their teenage son Seriozha seems well-balanced. Galina is on her phone an awful lot and Gleb is beginning to get suspicious about what she does with herself all day. In a finely orchestrated scene in a fancy restaurant, they dine with two other couples who define the hedonism and tastelessness of their class. That night Galina comes close to telling her husband how unhappy she is. But her affair with a divorced photographer will not remain hidden for long.

Adding to Gleb’s tension are staffing problems in the office, which are about to get worse when his men start getting drafted. He is called to the mayor’s office along with a handful of other business leaders in the community to make a deal: they are being given the option to choose which employees will be called up, so it won’t disrupt their business too much. It is selective slaughter, literally the power of life and death. In a later scene, an official gives a heartfelt patriotic speech to an assembly in uniform that leaves no doubt as to the casualties they are expecting.

Like Zviaguintsev’s tale of corruption Leviathan, the title Minotaur can initially sound like overreach in its reference to Greek mythology. It was a creature part man and part bull who lived in the center of a labyrinth. Every so often the people of Athens were forced by King Minos to sacrifice 14 young nobles to the ravenous monster. In the film, 14 is the number of employees that Gleb is ordered to render to the government draft. But he outwits the authorities by hiring 14 new workers for non-existent jobs, just so he can cull them to fulfil his company’s draft quota.

In the second half of the film, Gleb shows equal mastery in solving the problem of his wife’s infidelity, and he does it in broad daylight surrounded by witnesses. Mazurov plays the entitled businessman without a single crack in the façade. The fact that a simple telephone call to the mayor fixes everything for him brings home, in its outrageous way, how far corruption has gone in Russia. As a police detective who has been investigating the photographer’s disappearance says with a good-humored shrug, “Why do we bother?”

The whole film is exquisitely shot by Zviaguintsev’s regular cinematographer Mikhail Krichman, who goes from spacious interiors haunted by shadows to the diffused green lighting of rain-soaked forests. Also notable is the nearly abstract music score of veteran composers Evgueni and Sacha Galperine, perfectly on theme with its unsettling bursts of notes.

Director: Andrei Zviaguintsev
Screenwriters: Simon Lyashnko, Andrei Zviaguintsev
Producers: Charles Gillibert, Nathanael Karmitz, Marco Perego, Vindhya Sagar, Andrei Zviaguintsev
Cast: Dmitriy Mazurov, Iris Lebedeva
Cinematography: Mikhail Krichman
Production design: Andrey Ponkratov  levia
Music: Evgueni Galperine, Sacha Galperine
Sound: Andrei Dergatchev
Production companies: MK2 Productions (France), CG Cinéma (France), Arte France Cinéma, Aslanyurek Film Production (Turkey), Forma Pro Films (Estonia/Latvia), LEAF Entertainment (US), Razor Film Produktion (Germany)
World sales: MK2 Films
Venue: Cannes Film Festival (Competition)
In Russian
160 minutes

Spanish cinema legend Pedro Almodóvar continues his autumnal run of decorously underpowered work with Bitter Christmas, a soul-searching rumination on friendship, the artistic process and the ethical complexities of film-making itself. A rare non-world premiere to grab a main competition slot in Cannes, this low-voltage melodrama already had its domestic release in March, earning mixed reviews.

Of course, being an Almodóvar film, Bitter Christmas is still beautifully manicured and exquisitely styled, boasting more visual finesse and wry wit than most Palme d’Or contenders. But it feels a little like the 76-year-old auteur is repeating himself here with a minor-key piece of auto-fiction which too often slips into autopilot. Curzon have signed UK and Irish rights, while the director’s regular US partners Sony Picture Classics are covering North America.

Following a run of English-language projects, notably his elegantly sombre assisted-death drama The Room Next Door (2024), Almodóvar’s first film in his native language in five years returns him to some familiar late-career themes. Indeed, Bitter Christmas almost plays like a semi-remake of his prize-winning critical and commercial hit, Pain and Glory (2019). Both are semi-autobiographical portraits of veteran film-makers reflecting on love, loss and the tricky relationship between art and life.

Bitter Christmas is also being billed as the Spanish heavyweight’s most self-critical film to date. Which may be accurate but, like much of his later work, it also delivers little of the lusty mischief, dark humour and anarchic queerness of his early work. Successful artists inevitably mature into elder statement, of course, but mellow restraint has never been a good look for Almodóvar. The price of having such a strong authorial voice, to the extent of essentially creating your own genre, is that you will always be judged against your fabulous early work.

Expanded from a short story penned by the director many years ago, Bitter Christmas takes place in the familiar Almodóvar Cinematic Universe of anguished artistic types living in impeccably furnished apartments in moneyed bohemian corners of Madrid. The story intertwines two parallel plot lines, taking place 20 years apart, with characters and events that self-consciously mirror each other.

In the more contemporary scenes, older gay film director Raúl (Leonardo Sbaraglia), very clearly an Almodóvar surrogate, is struggling with low inspiration. He begins writing a screenplay about another film-maker, Elsa (Bárbara Lennie), an exercise in auto-fiction which switches genders but otherwise remains strongly autobiographical. These earlier sections take place in 2004, a year which Almodóvar says has pivotal significance for him, possibly due to his meta-fictional box-office hit Bad Education (2004), which also featured a struggling director protagonist and numerous flashback threads.

In one of the film’s funniest scenes, Elsa explains to a baffled hospital nurse that she is a “cult” film-maker, which means “most people don’t like my films.” Even so, she enjoys a luxurious lifestyle from making TV commercials and lives with a sexy younger boyfriend, hunky charmer Bonafacio (Patrick Criado), a fireman and occasional stripper.

But much like Raúl, who co-habits with his younger partner Santi (Quim Gutiérrez), these couples do not seem well-matched intellectually or emotionally. In both the “real” and fictional plots, Elsa and Raúl are surrounded by close friends grieving from family tragedy, shock bereavement and relationship break-ups, private traumas which these unscrupulous film-makers shamelessly cannibalise for their screenplays.

Bitter Christmas gently prods at these ideas in its episodic midsection, never quite persuading us that the navel-gazing anxieties of a few well-heeled neurotic artists adds up to more than a hill of beans in the real world. But a satisfying dramatic crescendo finally arrives in the closing act, when Raúl’s recently retired and brutally honest former assistant Mónica (Aitana Sánchez-Gijón) angrily berates him for being an emotional vampire, selfishly feeding off the tragic lives of friends, lovers and family members without their consent.

A long time coming, this climax is the film’s sharpest section, an auto-fictional commentary on the ethics of auto-fiction itself, with Almodóvar aiming some choice critical barbs at himself. With the gloves off, Monica tells Raúl he has become a complacent established artist, living off his prestige, coasting on mediocre work. His new feature, she argues, will be “a minor film but your followers will accept it.” Almodóvar is surely aware this critique could equally apply to Bitter Christmas. But diagnosing the problem is not the same as fixing it, of course.

Enjoyed purely as deluxe melodrama, Bitter Christmas has plenty of appealing elements, including uniformly strong performances, especially from Lennie and Sánchez-Gijon. Cinematographer Pau Esteve Birba, production designer Antxón Gómez and art director Isabel Peinado also do great work. The visual palette, as ever, is a gorgeous canvas of vivid citrus hues and Pop Art modernism, while a short subplot filmed on Lanzarote makes great use of the island’s striking extra-terrestrial beauty. Several achingly beautiful songs by legendary Mexican singer Chavela Vargas feature prominently while a lush orchestral jazz score, by Almodóvar regular Alberto Iglesias, adds a further layer of sensory opulence. This is an impeccably tailored film, even if the fabric feels a little thin.

Director, screenwriter: Pedro Almodóvar
Bárbara Lennie, Leonardo Sbaraglia, Aitana Sánchez-Gijón, Victoria Luengo, Patrick Criado, Milena Smit, Quim Gutiérrez
Cinematography: Pau Esteve Birba
Editing: Teresa Font
Music: Alberto Iglesias
Production designer: Antxón Gómez
Art Director: Isabel Peinado
Costume designer: Paco Delgado
Producer: Agustín Almodóvar
Production company: El Deseo (Spain)
World sales: Film Factory Entertainment
Venue: Cannes Film Festival (Competition)
In Spanish
112 minutes

The two actors play Mihai and Lisbet Gheorghiu, who have spent years living in his native Romania, in Bucharest. After the death of his parents, they decide to settle in the Norwegian village where she grew up, as Mihai’s in-laws can help them take care of their five children (the youngest of whom is still a little baby). The language barrier causes a little awkwardness (Mihai understands Norwegian but doesn’t speak it well, and the children are still learning), but English is widely accepted within the community, and everything seems to be going well, although some eyebrows are raised over the fact the children aren’t allowed cell phones or access to the Internet.

Then, one day, one of the teachers overhears an exchange between the two oldest kids that suggests the parents’ conservative, faith-based education methods might include physical violence. As others had previously noticed bruises on the children’s bodies, this causes the school to reach out to the relevant authorities, and soon a conflict arises: as they have to fight for the chance to keep seeing their children (kept separate not just from the parents, but also from each other), Mihai and Lisbet are confronted with the uncomfortable truth that, despite the progressive aura enveloping the country they live in, a culture clash will almost always be inevitable.

Per the press notes, the story – rooted in extensive research on similar cases, although the plot isn’t based on one specific incident – takes place in Norway (the shoot happened primarily in Ålesund, on the Western coast), but it could be any of the Nordic countries, all seen as a bastion of progressive values. This point is hammered home by the fact Denmark, Sweden and Finland all contributed to the production (with different crewmembers coming from all the concerned territories), and while xenophobia is not overtly mentioned, there is a subtle allusion to it via the presence of Mia (Lisa Carlehed), a Swede who relocated to the neighboring country and indirectly embodies the notion of someone who assimilated “correctly”.

Of course, the fact Fjord – a title indicative of the metaphorical waves and current that threaten to drag the parents into an abyss – was shot in Norway means Mungiu got to cast Reinsve as Lisbet, giving her another meaty role to chew on as a woman walking a tightrope between her country of origin and the culture she married into, trying to figure out exactly where things went wrong. It’s a role she could play in her sleep at this point, but the nuances in the screenplay, paired with her understated performance, make this mother of five a compellingly complex figure who periodically earns and then loses audience sympathy (viewers expecting a clean cut take on the subject will probably not be happy with what transpires in the third act).

Arguably even more impressive in Stan, who reconnects with his Romanian roots (he was raised in Bucharest and Vienna by his mother, and made his film debut in Michael Haneke’s 71 Fragments of a Chronology of Chance at the age of 11). Having previously wowed audiences with his turns in A Different Man and The Apprentice, playing men who felt confident – sometimes to a fault – with their verbal skills, here he scales it back as someone who has to express himself in a second or even third language, letting his incredulous and frustrated facial movements convey all the layers of simmering rage once he realizes the progressive society he was invited into draws certain lines when it comes to tolerance.

It’s all perfectly measured, much like the film itself, which Mungiu constructs with a clinical eye for observation without passing judgement; much like the people looking into Mihai and Lisbet’s conduct, his empathy lies primarily with the children, while still refusing to explicitly state which side he agrees with. The shades of gray, which at times blend with the white of the snow-covered mountains, remain constant as the director examines a new microcosm, through the prism of globalization, to deliver his most internationally conscious viewpoint to date on something he has always emphasized: we all contain multitudes. Whether they’re compatible, within the same person of between different people, is left entirely up to the viewer.

Director, Screenwriter: Cristian Mungiu
Cast: Sebastian Stan, Renate Reinsve, Lisa Carlehed, Ellen Dorrit Petersen, Lisa Loven Kongsli, Henrikke Lund-Olsen, Vanessa Ceban, Christian Rubeck, Markus Scarth Tønseth
Producers: Cristian Mungiu, Dyveke Bjørkly Graver, Andrea Berentsen Ottmar, Katrin Pors, Mikkel Jersin, Jussi Rantamäki, Emilia Haukka, Sean Wheelan, Kristina Börjeson, Mimmi Spång, Pascal Caucheteux, Vincent Maraval, Grégoire Sorlat, Marco Perego, Adela Vrânceanu Celibidache
Cinematography: Tudor Vladimir Panduru
Production design: Marius Winje Brustad, Simona P?dure?u
Costume design: Kirsi Gum
Music: Kaspar Kaae
Sound: Constantin Fleancu, Pietu Korhonen, Kristian Eidnes Andersen
Production companies: Mobra Film, Why Not Productions, Eye Eye Pictures, Film i Väst,
Garagefilm International, Snowglobe, Aamu Film Company, France 3 Cinéma, Goodfellas
World sales: Goodfellas
Venue: Cannes Film Festival (Competition)
In Norwegian, English, Swedish, Romanian
146 minutes

Jon Favreau created the Disney+ version, which played like a star-hopping take on The Fugitive or Route 66, with our Mandalorian hero Din Djarin (Pablo Pascal) getting into and out of a sticky situation over the course of each episode accompanied by Grogu (unofficially also known as “Baby Yoda”), the powerful infant alien to whom the Mandalorian grew closer and more fatherly with each passing adventure. Their stories take place in a universe still reeling from the overthrow of the Empire, well before the rise of the New Order. (aka, after Return of the Jedi and before The Force Awakens.)

For the movie, Favreau seems to be taking his cues from the 007 franchise: the Mandalorian and Grogu are searching the galaxy for former Empire higher-ups pushing back against the New Republic, taking assignments from Colonel Ward (Sigourney Weaver), who’s equal parts M and Q, tut-tutting the Mandalorian’s results as “messy, messy” when he invariably kills his prey rather than capture them for questioning. (Weaver’s signature tone of honey-dipped disappointment fits perfectly into her franchise debut.)

One of those assignments, involving Rotta the Hutt (voiced by Jeremy Allan White) — son of Jabba — becomes significantly more complicated and dangerous than it first appears, which cues the chasing and the fighting and deadly aliens and the thrill-ride portions of this intended summer blockbuster. (To say more than that would be to incur the wrath of spoiler-hating fans and Disney publicists.)

There’s certainly some television structure at play in the screenplay (by Favreau and fellow series vets Dave Filoni and Noah Kloor); one could argue that the movie plays like a two-episode arc writ large. (Part I focuses on the Mandalorian; Part II on Grogu.) But since The Mandalorian was a TV show with the shape and scope of feature films, it’s a natural progression for the property. There’s no shortage of Star Wars–level wow factor, from the slimy beasts to the outer-space dogfights to Ludwig Göransson’s score, which retains the majestic badassery of the TV theme but permutates into a dizzyingly eclectic collection of tones and variations over the course of the feature.

Pascal generates enough charisma that he makes the Mandalorian captivating even through what is mostly a vocal performance. (The character, like others of his clan, nearly always wears the face-occluding helmet; it’s a thing.) As for Grogu, who gets to expand beyond his sidekick role here, he’s an onscreen creation second only to Paddington Bear in his ability to zero in on the sentimental parts of the human brain. He’s utterly adorable, and it’s to Favreau’s credit that the movie doesn’t lean too hard on Grogu’s cuteness to get by.

There are Easter eggs aplenty for fans of the Star Wars saga, and The Mandalorian and Grogu plants a few possibilities for sequels and spinoff characters without being too obvious about it. For Favreau, philosophy and world-building is obviously the stuff of the TV show; now that it’s a movie, it’s time for fun and thrills.

Director: Jon Favreau
Screenwriters: Jon Favreau & Dave Filoni & Noah Kloor
Cast: Pedro Pascal, Sigourney Weaver, Jeremy Allen White
Executive producers: Karen Gilchrist, John Bartnicki, Carrie Beck
Producers: Kathleen Kennedy, Ian Bryce, Jon Favreau, Dave Filoni
Director of photography: David Klein
Production design: Andrew L. Jones, Doug Chiang
Editing: Rachel Goodlett Katz, Dylan Firshein
Music: Ludwig Göransson
Sound design: David Acord, sound designer/supervising sound editor
Production companies: Lucasfilm
In English
132 minutes

Switching bodies is a daring premise for a film about sexual identity, rich as it is in references to modern concepts of gender fluidity, but the film is also intent on exploring a raw and quite frightening primal fear of the opposite sex. Director Arthur Harari, who authored the multi-awarded screenplay Anatomy of a Fall with Justine Triet, here works with co-screenwriters Lucas Harari and Vincent Poymiro to flesh out a kinky can’t-look-away story, without lowering it to the exploitative level of so many horror films. On the contrary, the story vaunts its own sort of poetry as the characters yearn for each other’s bodies, which once were theirs. For this reason it may have less grip on wide genre audiences than on the festival crowd; but in any case, Cannes competition is an auspicious start.

Though the POV keeps shifting, the main consciousness of the story is David Zimmerman (Niels Schneider), a melancholy photographer who is obsessed with the past. He finds the exact location of old French postcards and then photographs the modern eyesore industrial and high-rise architecture that has taken its place. A true recluse, he has to be dragged by his sister Alice and friends to a stunningly colorful masked ball, where a raving crowd demolishes a giant Trump head. Overflowing with masked guests, the party introduces a psychedelic atmosphere that is underlined when David is handed a pill by a stranger.

He takes it. Soon he is following a mysterious woman in a trench coat. Without speaking a word, Eva (Léa Seydoux) leads him into a dark basement and initiates a wild coupling that could be described as animal-like or demonic – the jury is still out on what is going on. David loses consciousness after a howling climax and when he comes to, he is horrified to find himself in Eva’s body.

The apparent senselessness of the changeover leads to all sorts of theories that will keep fantasy audiences entertained while the characters frantically look for a way to turn back into their original selves. As in Kafka’s story (or David Robert Mitchell’s It Follows, a horror film with some notable resemblances), at first everybody presumes the body change is a temporary inconvenience, possibly caused by an evil entity transmitting itself during intercourse. David, now in Eva’s body (the viewer needs to keep close track of who’s who), has some embarrassing encounters with family and friends before he realizes his only chance to change things back is to find Eva, now in his body.

So starts a non-stop chase through a series of French locations. As the situation becomes increasingly complex, panic sets in. A third body change happens, adding another young woman named Malia (Lilith Grasmug, Foreign Language) to the hunt, along with her excitable dad played vividly by director Radu Jude. Eva and David team up to more-or-less work together, they discover another possible victim who hints she has been re-embodied for years. That’s depressing.

Though this part of the film is structured and paced like a thriller, the protags are anything but action heroes. More in the tradition of experimental SF characters, Eva and David are alienated singles living in their own closed worlds. They are unable to communicate with anyone they love and care about, and unable to love each other because of an irremovable physical barrier. Perhaps that is the source of the film’s aura of bittersweet melancholy, a yearning for things just beyond one’s grasp.

There are undoubtedly loose ends in the story, perhaps red herrings to which one looks for meaning where there is none, like David’s Jewishness, the Bob Dylan song “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue” over the end credits, the unseen evil entity… But despite some annoying trickery, the film reaches a miraculous, wordless conclusion of self-acceptance that feels just right.  

Director: Arthur Harari
Screenwriters: Arthur Harari, Lucas Harari, Vincent Poymiro
Producer: Nicolas Anthomé, Lionel Guedj
Cast: Léa Seydoux, Niels Schneider, Valérie Dreville, Radu Jude, Shanti Masud, Jonathan Turnbull, Victoire Du Bois
Cinematography: Tom Harari
Production design: Emmanuelle Duplay
Editing: Laurent Sénéchal
Music: Andrea Poggio
Sound: Julien Tan Ham Sicart, Olivier Goinard, Fanny Martin, Jeanne Delplancq
Production companies: Bathysphere (France), To Be Continued (France)
World sales: Pathé Films
Venue: Cannes Film Festival (Competition)
In French
139 minutes

Na has a solid commercial track record in Korea, plus prize-winning form in Cannes. Following The Chaser (2008), The Yellow Sea (2011) and The Wailing (2016), his latest feature marks his fourth visit to the French festival, and his first time in the main competition. Reportedly the most expensive film in South Korean history, Hope is also Na’s most full-throated crowd-pleaser to date, packed with breathless extended action sequences, high-calibre stunt work, world-class production design and rowdy slapstick humour.

That said, Hope is also disappointingly light on plot or character psychology, lacking the deeper socio-political bite that international audiences have come to expect from festival-friendly genre films in the wake of Get Out (2017), Parasite (2019), The Substance (2024) and others. Never mind subtext, there is barely even text here. Some of the CGI monster effects also look oddly cheap and clunky, while the relentless wham-bang action become a little exhausting over the film’s unwieldy 160-minute span. Hope is not pitched at art-house connoisseurs but, judging by its generally warm reception in Cannes so far, it has premiered just in time to give jaded critics some much-needed escapist thrills after a week of mostly po-faced misery dramas. Box office prospects should be healthy, with Neon and MUBI already signed up to cover most European, North American and English-speaking markets.

Hope takes place in a small South Korean harbour town of the same name, close to the Demilitarized Zone and the border with North Korea. Cynical, foul-mouthed police chief Bum-seok (Hwang Jung-min) and his trusted cousin Sung-ki (Zo In-Sung) are summoned to a grisly rural crime scene, the bloody carcass of a cow that has been slashed to death. A team of hunters blame a tiger rumoured to haunt the nearby mountains, but it soon becomes clear the town is under assault from something bigger, weirder and far more dangerous.

When Bum-soek investigates the town of Hope itself, he finds an apocalyptic war zone of smashed buildings, wrecked vehicles and mangled human corpses. Na teasingly keeps the cause of all this carnage off screen for almost 45 minutes, but eventually reveals it to be a kind of humanoid alien hybrid beast in the middle of a rage-crazed, hugely destructive, Godzilla-sized rampage. The film’s opening hour then becomes virtually one long hyperkinetic battle sequence, with sassy young female officer Sung-ae (Jung) joining Bum-seok for a breakneck monster showdown involving shotguns, bazookas and rubber-burning car chases.

An hour into Hope, with the beast seemingly vanquished and the surviving townsfolk tending their wounds, Sung-ae hubristically declares “this is where it ends.” But of course, in grand action thriller tradition, this is only the beginning. As Sung-ki and his motley team of hunters discover while sweeping the nearby mountains, the killer creature has arrived on Earth aboard a giant silver spaceship, which is teeming with many other fellow flesh-chomping monsters, diverse in look and size, with variable roles and ranks. After a brief breathing space, Na revs up for an even bigger extended set-piece battle featuring forest gunfights, high-speed vehicle stunts and blood-splattered twists. Once again, these action scenes are expertly choreographed, but soon become repetitive.

Hope concludes with a jarring shift of focus, hinting at some vast extra-terrestrial conflict unfolding in the skies above Korea. In this final act, Vikander and Fassbender make their extended digital cameos as CGI aliens with Avatar overtones. This poorly explained, belated piece of fantasy world-building is obviously intended as a sequel teaser, but it belongs in an entirely different cinematic universe to the two-hours-plus orgy of gleefully gory cartoon carnage that has gone before.

In its favour, Hope is never less than entertaining, boasting high-gloss production values and virtuoso slapstick stunts worthy of Buster Keaton in his prime. Cinematographer Hong Kyung-pyo, a Na regular who also shot Parasite, gives the action a lush widescreen look, subtly blending majestic landscape shots filmed in both Korea and Romania. Brimming with salty language and cheerfully crude toilet jokes, the screenplay also contains some pleasingly meta, self-aware commentary on its own plot conventions. A chest-thumping score by frequent Jordan Peele collaborator Michael Abels invokes some of the old-school orchestral swagger of classic Hollywood.

Director, screenwriter: Na Hong-jin
Cast: wang Jung-min, Zo In-sung, Jung Ho-yeon, Taylor Russell, Cameron Britton, Alicia Vikander, Michael Fassbender
Cinematographer: Hong Kyung-pyo
Editing: Kim Sunmin
Music: Michael Abels
Producers: Na Hong-jin, Saemin Kim, Saerom Kim
Production company: Forged Films (South Korea)
World sales: Plus M, Seoul
Venue: Cannes Film Festival (Competition)
In Korean
160 minutes

América Latina atesora el melodrama pero La perra de Dominga Sotomayor hace de la sobriedad su mejor herramienta en esta película sobresaliente.

La perra está basada en la novela homónima de Pilar Quintana. La película mueve la narración 5000 al sur del mismo oceáno; de una comunidad de afrodescendientes en el pacífico colombiano a una isla en la región del Bio Bio en Chile. La adaptación, más bien reescritura de la directora y la guionista Ines Bortegaray, pule el retrato de la simbiosis de la protagonista con su entorno.

Silvia (Manuela Oyarzún), una mujer adusta al final de la treintena vive con su pareja Mario (David Gaete) en una casa modesta alejada del muelle y el caserío. Silvia es casi ermitaña con un deber especial:  es la guardiana de una monumental estructura de concreto vacía con la excepción de una recámara que ella limpia con asiduidad y devoción. Ellos y toda la isla viven de recoger algas marinas comestibles y pescar. La vida cotidiana -dura pero tranquila y con buenos ratos- cambia cuando Silvia adopta a una cachorrita que los pescadores recogieron en el mar. Cuando elige su nombre Yuri, ya son inseparables.

A pesar de algunos pequeños tropiezos – anticipar la tragedia, el más claro- Sotomayor resuelve con seguridad uno de los temas más difíciles del cine: el abandono. ¿Cómo retratar la ausencia?, ¿cualquier ausencia es abandono?, ¿tiene culpa el que abandona?, o ¿tal vez el abandonado?  La perra hace estas preguntas, sin palabras,  varias veces y deja que espectador que las conteste, o no, según le parezca. Hay material para varias teorías.

Silvia vive del mar, lo conoce íntimamente;  su fisonomía adusta refleja la naturaleza agreste de la isla. La impecable fotografía  de Simone D’Arcangelo  y la calculada edición  de Federico Rotstein nos dan la belleza del lugar sin convertirlo en un promocional turístico.

La actuación de  Manuela Oyarzún como protagonista es parca pero refleja el arco narrativo. Sus rasgos se suavizan cuando está con Yuri mucho más que con Mario. Cuando sus recuerdos -la explicación para la audiencia- se intercalan con el presente, vamos desde la apatía de Silvia joven (Rafaella Grimberg) por la ausencia de su madre – hasta la desesperación  y la rabia por otras desapariciones. Cuando Silvia  decide ser la que abandona, Oyarzún  es la cara de la venganza por todos los que han dejado la isla.

Las dos primeras películas de Sotomayor —De jueves a domingo y Demasiado tarde para morir joven— le dieron suficiente prestigio para asegurar que La perra tenga una muy buena temporada en festivales. La pequeña pero encantadora participación del famoso actor brasileño Selton Mello, junto con una buena acogida en Cannes, aumentaría sus posibilidades de una distribución internacional.

Director: Dominga Sotomayor
Guion: Inés Bortagaray, basada en la novela homónima de Pilar Quintana
Productores: Rodrigo Teixeira, Fernando Bascuñán, Berta Marchiori
Productores ejecutivos: Nicolás San Martín, Selton Mello, Fernando Fuentes
Elenco: Manuela Oyarzún, David Gaete, Selton Mello, Paula Luchsinger, Paula Dinamarca, Rafaella Grimberg
Fotografía: Simone D’Arcangelo
Edición: Federico Rotstein
Diseño de producción: Natalia Geisse
Diseño de vestuario: Francisca Tuca
Música: Clint Mansell
Sonido: Javier Umpierrez
Compañías productoras: RT Features (Brasil) , Planta (Chile), Fondo de Fomento Audiovisual Convocatorias 2024 & 2026 of the Ministerio de las Culturas, las Artes y el Patrimonio del Gobierno de Chile..
Ventas internacionales: Lucky Number (Fr
Muestra: Cannes Film Festival (Un Certain Regard)
En español
112 minutos

Latin Americans treasure melodrama, but Dominga Sotomayor’s La Perra makes sobriety her best tool in this outstanding film.

Based on a novel by Pilar Quintana, the film relocates the book’s narrative around 3100 miles to the south, from a community of Afro-descendants in the Colombian Pacific to an island in the Bio Bio region of southern Chile. The adaptation, more of a rewrite by screenwriter Inés Bortegaray, polishes the portrait of the symbiosis between the protagonist and her environment.

Silvia (Manuela Oyarzún) is a harsh woman in her late thirties who lives with her partner
Mario (David Gaete) in a modest house far from the pier and the nearest small town. She is a semi-hermit with one special duty: she is the guardian of a monumental concrete structure, empty
except for a bedroom that she cleans every day with devotion. Like the other inhabitants of the island, the couple make a living harvesting edible seaweed and fishing. Daily life is hard but quiet and with some good times. But all that changes when Silvia adopts a puppy that fishermen rescued at sea. By the time she names her “Yuri”, they are already inseparable.

Despite some small stumbles – the most noticeable is the way the screenplay telegraphs tragedy —  Sotomayor confidently resolves one of cinema´s most difficult issues: visualizing abandonment. How do you portray absence? Is any absence abandonment? Must the abandoner feel guilty? Or perhaps we should blame the one who is abandoned? The film asks these questions repeatedly and lets the viewer decide whether to answer them or not, as they see fit — there is material here for all.

Because Silvia lives off the sea, she knows it intimately; Manuela Oyarzún’s stern face reflects the island’s rugged nature. Simone D’Arcangelo’s impeccable photography and Federico Rotstein´s careful editing give us the beauty of the place without turning it into a travelogue.

Oyarzún’s performance in the leading role is spare, reflecting the lean narrative arc. Her features soften when she is with Yuri much more than with Mario. Her memories – explaining her backstory for the audience’s benefit – alternate with the present time, taking the story from the apathy of young Silvia (Rafaella Grimberg) due to her mother’s absence, to her despair and anger at other disappearances. When she decides to be the one who leaves, Oyarzún embodies revenge for all those who have left the island.

Sotomayor’s first two films, From Thursday to Sunday and Too Late to Die Young, gave her enough prestige to ensure La perra will have a strong festival run. A charming small role by the acclaimed Brazilian actor Selton Mello plus a good reception in Cannes’ Directors’ Fortnight section should improve its chances internationally.

Director: Dominga Sotomayor
Screenplay: Inés Bortagaray, based in the novel by Pilar Quintana
Producers: Rodrigo Teixeira, Fernando Bascuñán, Berta Marchiori
executive producers: Nicolás San Martín, Selton Mello, Fernando Fuentes
Cast: Manuela Oyarzún, David Gaete, Selton Mello, Paula Luchsinger, Paula Dinamarca, Rafaella Grimberg
Cinematography: Simone D’Arcangelo
Edition: Federico Rotstein
Production Designer: Natalia Geisse
Costume designer: Francisca Tuca
Music: Clint Mansell
Sound: Javier Umpierrez
Production Companies: RT Features (Brazil) , Planta (Chile), Fondo de Fomento Audiovisual of the Ministerio de las Culturas, las Artes y el Patrimonio del Gobierno de Chile.
World Sales: Lucky Number
Venue: Cannes Film Festival (Un Certain Regard)
In Spanish
112 minutes

A world premiere in the cult-friendly Midnight section in Cannes, Species expands on Le Corroller’s 2020 short, No More God in Doctor, and was partly inspired by her own experiences in a stressful finance job. Though the plotting is sometimes haphazard and the satire very broad, the film’s heady blend of elevated genre elements, superlative visual effects, splatter violence and political subtext should add up to healthy audience appeal. A domestic release is scheduled for October.

Inevitably, Species has been widely compared to other female-directed, feminist-leaning body-horror films that became Cannes sensations: notably Julia Ducournau’s Raw (2016) and Titane (2021), and Coralie Fargeat’s The Substance (2024). Le Corroller has been wary of these parallels in her promotional interviews, citing Ari Aster and Yorgos Lanthimos as more direct inspirations, but the similarities are hard to ignore, and will certainly prove helpful as marketing angles. The stand-out body-mutation sequences here are handled by special make-up effects designer Pierre-Olivier Persin, for example, who won an Oscar for The Substance.

Named Sanguine in French – a much better title than its blandly bloodless English alternative – Species sets out its satirical stall early with a lively prologue set in a gaudy fast food restaurant, where an entitled online influencer makes too many diva demands on an already pressurised server, pushing him over the edge from ritual politeness to bludgeoning violence. Just to underscore the Looney Tunes comic tone, the restaurant is called Bloody Burger. This is not a subtle movie.

That said, the central plot is as much psychological character study as genre thriller. It follows Margot (Belgian rising star Mara Taquin), a new recruit to the brutally competitive team of young medical interns staffing a frantically busy hospital emergency room in an unnamed French city. Her boss is Professor Virgile (Karen Viard), a tyrannical ice queen who Margot’s fellow trainee doctors call “the devil”. Indeed, the opening act of Species might have been called The Devil Wears Surgical Scrubs.

But more nightmarish Cronenberg-ian elements soon come to dominate as Margot begins treating patients with unexplained conditions, from grotesque skin lesions to sweating blood. Crucially, this COVID-like pandemic appears to mainly afflict younger people in pressurised, precarious jobs who simply cannot afford to be sick.

The same applies to Margot. When she begins exhibiting similar terrifying symptoms, she initially struggles to conceal them from her co-worker rivals Louis (Sami Outalbali) and Pauline (Kim Higelin), which proves especially difficult as all three share an uneasy, volatile sexual chemistry. Professor Virgile reassures Margot she is merely suffering from hematidrosis, a real condition in which blood floods the sweat glands, typically triggered by extreme stress. But the professor has her own dubious agenda, and her vague diagnosis does not explain the nationwide wave of lethal violence and sudden death that the sickness appears to have unleashed. With her life at risk, Margot becomes a kind of undercover medical detective, frantically seeking answers as her body starts to mutate, transform and disintegrate.

After this suspenseful but slightly incoherent set-up, Species kicks into high gear for the frenzied final act, which features some terrific visual effects and deliciously visceral gore, all climaxing with a bravura high-speed orgy of skin-slashing, blood-pumping guerrilla surgery. Le Corroller’s final satirical punchline, which hints that the sickness could be some kind of evolutionary biological weapon in an inter-generational class war, is an audacious twist but not wholly convincing.

Ultimately, Species never quite hits the same eye-popping, flesh-tearing, pulp-deluxe heights as Titane or The Substance. But this is still an admirably ambitious and mostly satisfying debut driven by a kinetic, all-guns-blazing performance from Taquin. Her compelling depiction of manic meltdown is reinforced by cinematographer Guillame Schiffman’s heavily stylised, reality-bending lenswork and a relentlessly pumping electronic score by French musician Robin Coudert, aka ROB, whose has previously worked with a long list of cult horror directors including Coralie Fargeat.

Director: Marion Le Corroller
Screenwriters: Marion Le Corroller, Thomas Pujol
Cast: Mara Taquin, Karin Viard, Kim Higelin, Sami Outalbali, Stefan Crepon, Sonia Faïdi
Cinematography: Guillame Schiffman
Editing: Jerome Altabet
Production designer: Anne-Sophie Delseries
Music: Rob
Producer: Carole Lambert
Production company: Windy (France)
World sales: WTFilms, Paris
In French
103 minutes

Bowing in the Directors’ Fortnight sidebar at Cannes, the documentary will definitely appeal to global cinephiles like his 2004 piece Le Filmeur did. Even those who don’t know his work can enjoy the documentary, viewing it as the video diary of a tipsy, funny uncle.

The film begins in 2011, when Cavalier is shooting the low-budget Pater – a film in which he shared acting duties and camerawork with his regular collaborator, the actor Vincent Lindon. We then see him filming his deluxe hotel room in Cannes, where the film was selected for competition. Black comedy ensues when he and his life partner, the editor Françoise Widhoff, get off a train heading towards Cannes to return to Paris after being informed they didn’t win anything.

Boasting a very barbed sense of humour that makes her the yang to Cavalier’s yin, Widhoff is just as much a star of the documentary as the director himself. We see her mocking Cavalier for filming footage “which has tons of atmosphere”; we see her wrapping up their deceased cat in a red blanket, her last words to her pet completely heartbreaking. It’s only the first of many deaths in the documentary, as Cavalier marks the passing of friends such as the French writer Emmanuèle Bernheim, the subject of his 2019 doc Living and Knowing You’re Alive, and the death of his own brother.

As Thanks for Coming ushers us through Cavalier’s previous decade, we witness how this genuinely independent filmmaker develops his ideas and tries to follow them through. Somewhere in the documentary, Cavalier describes the objective of his late-stage filmmaking as the search for the “first images of my childhood”. Interestingly, there aren’t any in Thanks for Coming; rather, Cavalier offers footage which can allow us to speculate on his inner being. A close-up of his hands breaking bread and his offscreen voice talking about Jesus and the apostles, for example, could be interpreted as his belief in solidarity among men. His ramshackle enactment of war using a tiny toy robot and toothpicks is juxtaposed with his comments about the Odyssey, probably alluding to his craving for journeys.

Such philosophical meanderings are lined up side by side with images of more banal things, such as the running joke of Cavalier mumbling in voiceover about the quality of the hotel rooms he has to stay in as he travels across France for screenings and masterclasses. At the end of the documentary, Cavalier says he won’t be travelling for these appointments anymore. He didn’t attend the premiere of the film at Cannes – but, well, never say never with such a lively character.

Director, screenplay, cinematography: Alain Cavalier
Producers: Michel Seydoux
Editing: Emmanuel Manzano
Sound: Steve Raccah
Production companies: Camera One
World sales: Camera One
Venue: Cannes Film Festival (Directors’ Fortnight)
In French
82 minutes

Set and shot in the city of Calvin, the film revolves around Johanna Schopfer, playing a lightly fictionalized version of herself. She works at the assembly line in a luxury watch factory, but without the visual elegance the sector got in Cyril Schäublin’s period piece Unrest: these scenes are as far removed from stereotypical Helvetic ostentatiousness as they can get, not least because the opulence would run counter to the simplicity directors Céline Carridroit and Aline Suter seek to capture.

Summer is around the corner, and while everyone else goes on vacation, Johanna sticks around, enjoying lakeside activities with her friends. Then, as she contemplates disposing of her VW Beetle, she decides to go in the opposite direction and restore it, reclaiming a part of herself that was rejected after she transitioned. That vehicle is the bridge between her old world and the new one, and much like Johanna herself it sort of exists on its own terms, not quite at the same rhythm as everything else.

Described as an autofiction (the staged structure being a practical necessity to account for Schopfer’s real-life work schedule and availability for filming), Summer Drift was shot over the course of four summers, condensed into one on the screen. Per the directors, the choice to use 16mm film stock was partly sociopolitical, to acknowledge the fact they’re spotlighting a person from the LGBTQ+ community who would most likely not have been present – at least not overtly so – in similar indie projects from decades past.

It is also in keeping with their aim to showcase a different side of Geneva, a more timeless one. Famously high-class and expensive (it’s no coincidence one of the most prominent national TV series shot on location was literally called Quartier des banques), the city undergoes a transformation through the lens adopted by Carridroit and Suter: it’s timeless and almost elemental, with water playing a crucial role. And with that old school flicker, Lake Geneva looks even more beautiful and serene than usual, the ideal escape for those who find themselves oppressed by the everyday grind imposed by capitalism.

And in the middle of all that, Johanna Schopfer shines bright as the star of an existence she gets to reclaim and redefine with wit and charm (including her charismatic regional accent). And while there is no obvious boundary between performing and being observed (her personality, also expressed through self-published comic books, having served as a major inspiration for the hybrid approach in making the film), she has a natural understanding with the camera, effortlessly driving or floating through the hottest period of the year as the director duo immortalizes all that with an energy that matches hers: slightly off-kilter, but quietly engaging over the course of an hour and a half on the shores of the Léman.

Directors, Screenwriters: Céline Carridroit, Aline Suter
Cast: Johanna Schopfer
Producer: Aurélien Marsais, Cécile Lestrade, Elise Hug
Cinematography: Victor Zébo, Aurore Toulon
Sound: Xavier Lavorel, Eliot Ratinaud, Gerald Wang, Sophie Dascal, Timothée Zurbuchen
Production companies: Cavale Films, Alter Ego Production
World sales: MoreThan Films
Venue: Cannes Film Festival (ACID)
In French
89 minutes