Golden Pyramid Award For Best Film
Dragonfly
Director: Paul Andrew Williams

Silver Pyramid for Best Director
Tarzan and Arab Nasser
Once Upon a Time in Gaza

Bronze Pyramid Special Jury Prize
As We Breathe
Director: Seamus Alton

Naguib Mahfouz Award For Best Screenplay
The Things You Kill
Directors, screenplay: Alireza Khatami

Best Actor Award
Maid Eid
Once Upon a Time in Gaza

Best Actress Award – ex aequo
Andrea Riseborough
Brenda Blethyn
Dragonfly

Henry Barakat Award For Best Artistic Contribution
Cinematography: Matthew Giombini
Sand City
Director: Necmi Sancak

Youssef Sherif Rizkallah Audience Award 
One More Show
Directors: Mai Saad, Ahmed El Danaf

HORIZONS OF ARAB CINEMA COMPETITION

Saad Eldin Wahba Award for Best Arabic Film
Dead Dog
Director: Sara Francis

Salah Abu Seif Special Jury Prize
Anti-Cinema
Director: Ali Saeed

Best Screenplay Award
Complaint No. 713317
Director, screenplay: Yasser Shafiee

Best Acting Award
Afaf Ben Mahmoud
Round 13

NETPAC AWARD FOR BEST ASIAN FEATURE FILM
The Botanist
Director: Jing Yi

BEST ARAB FEATURE FILM AWARD
Once Upon a Time in Gaza
Director: Tarzan and Arab Nasser

Special Mention
Flana
Director: Zahraa Ghandour

The International Critics Prize (FIPRESCI)
The Things You Kill
Director: Alireza Khatami

SHORT FILMS COMPETITION

Youssef Chahine Award for Best Short Film
Cairo Streets
Director: Abdullah Al-Taye

Best Arab Short Film Award
Two Tetas
Director: Lene El Safah

Watch It Special Jury Prize
A Very Straight Neck
Director: Nyo Sora

INTERNATIONAL CRITICS WEEK COMPETITION

Shady Abdel Salam Award for Best Film
Habibi Hussein
Director: Alex Bakri

Fathi Farag Special Jury Prize
My Parents’ House
Director: Tim Elrich

Special Mention
The Botanist
Director: Jing Yi

DOCUMENTARY FILM AWARD
Souraya Mon Amour
Director: Nicolas Khoury

Based on a novella by Georgy Demidov, a Soviet physicist who spent fourteen years in a gulag as a political prisoner, its mordant absurdity has shades of both Kafka and Gogol, and is delivered with the lean sophistication of a director already proved to be an adept chronicler in both documentary and drama of the grim dances of state repression and civic resistance. The film is set in the USSR in 1937, at the height of Stalin’s Great Purge, but its stark relevance for today’s era of resurgent authoritarianism is unmistakable. A pointed warning, it’s among Loznitsa’s sharpest dissections of regime terror and its mechanisms yet.

Alexander Kornyev, a new local prosecutor (an impressive Alexander Kuznetsov), is a dedicated Bolshevik. His belief that the system is overseen by men of great principle, who would not hesitate to intervene should they catch wind of any case of lower-level power abuse, is almost fable-like in its innocence, though his faith is fading fast and the young appointee is already looking pale and harried. Letters from falsely accused political prisoners, some whose dedication to communism did not save them from falling foul of the regime, are routinely burnt in Bryansk’s prison before their appeals can be read by those with influence. One message written in blood miraculously made it to Kornyev’s desk, activating the energetic sense of duty that may prove his undoing.

As soon as Kornyev arrives at the jail from a long train journey to request a meeting with the detainee, he is plunged into a surreal waiting game by the cynical staff who are taken aback by this rare sort of investigation and uneager to grant him access or guide him through the austere corridors. Right from the start, there’s an inexorable sense of dreadful inevitability that this cannot end well for the visitor. But Loznitsa is a genius at suspenseful ambiguity, and keeps us guessing over the specifics of how his fate will play out, in a system awash with hypocrisy and suspicion, where most citizens survive by veiling their genuine thoughts and intentions.

Acclaimed D.O.P. Oleg Mutu impeccably lenses this world of deception and entrapment for maximum claustrophobia, boxed into cells, poky waiting rooms, corridors and cramped train carriages where strangers crowd Kornyev with artificial smiles, ghoulish jokes and prying questions. The prison and officious institutions where the action takes place and “communist justice” is decided and delivered are so bled of vivid colour as to be almost monochrome.

When Kornyev persists enough to meet with the letter-writer, Stepniak (Alexander Filippenko), he is greatly impacted by the prisoner’s scars of torture and panicked descriptions of the extraction of false confessions. Stepniak, a once great legal mind and now victim of the NKVD (the secret police), ousted from party favour and left to rot in silent isolation, recognises this is not only the first but probably the last sympathetic ally from the outside he will encounter. Acting on blind faith that seeking out an ear right at the top will be the most fruitful strategy to rectify this travesty, Kornyev traverses the country again determined to meet and share his findings with the Attorney General in Moscow, yet another stage in a very dangerous, and vastly unequal, game of cat and mouse. That the idealistic hope of this young prosecutor, already deep inside the cogs of the system, comes across as barely credible naivete at points is perhaps the most devastating aspect of all. His human urge to empathy is so out of place in this all-encompassing hell of corruption and normalised moral decay, where loyal incompetents are much more useful than principled believers for shoring up brute power, that it is nothing short of peculiar for all whose orbit is impinged upon by his inconvenient reports.

Director, Screenwriter: Sergei Loznitsa
Producer: Kevin Chneiweiss
Cinematographer: Oleg Mutu
Editor: Danielius Kokanauskis
Cast: Alexander Kuznetsov, Alexander Filippenko, Anatoly Beliy
Production Design: Jurij Grigorovi?, Aldis Meinerts
Sound Design: Vladimir Golovnitski
Music: Christiaan Verbeek
Production companies: SBS Productions (France), LOOKSfilm, Atoms & Void, Avanpost Media, Studio Uljana Kim, The Match Factory
Sales: Coproduction Office
Venue: Sarajevo (In Focus)
In Russian
118 minutes

Many refugees who fled Chechnya during the series of wars that started in the ‘90s have made new homes in Pankisi, which is just over the mountain and is as close as they can feel to a homeland that is still too dangerous and politically volatile for them to return to, and the director mulls over, at the age of forty, whether he should also resettle there. The slow and oblique nature of the film, which won the Golden Eye Award for Best Documentary and the French Touch Prize at Cannes, where it premiered in Critics’ Week, requires concentration and may limit its commercial prospects, but its unforced lyricism and fresh, multi-layered reflections on the dreams of the displaced, in a region of the Caucasus too often reduced to heavyhanded media depictions, should easily find it passionate fans in festival audiences.

Déni dreamed as a child of building a treehouse in Chechnya, and has brought architectural plans along on his journey to consider whether he can feasibly construct his imagined residence in Pankisi, or whether he should sell the plot. A-frame and elevated high above the ground, it would be quite a departure from the usual homes there, and the sketches cause some puzzlement among tradition-bound locals. This disjuncture between set ways and an abstract fantasy of utopia is just one aspect of a whole tangle of conflicting, deeply rooted and overwhelming emotions for Déni around the themes of nostalgia, place and identity. As he spends time with close relatives he has not seen for some time, he revisits memories from the vantage point of age and bonds complicated by trauma, in a poetic, highly personal film that is full of searching questions about what dreams and freedom really mean for those who are lost without a homeland, and still harbouring the pain of forced separations.

A key conversation towards the end between Déni and his father is edged with buried resentments. His long absent dad, who is now remarried with another family, touches on the brutal 1995 Samaskhi massacre of civilians in the First Chechen War, elucidating some of the underlying currents of historical unease and fear through oppression that haunt the Chechen diaspora. Déni’s parents divorced when he was small, and he moved to Russia for a time with his mother, who urged him to adopt a new name to hide his Chechen identity and alleviate the rampant bullying at school. Déni’s thinking comes from “over there” in the west, his father tells him, underscoring the sense of belonging not fully here nor there that the filmmaker, like many immigrants, grapples with, and the gulf in values that has grown in all his years away from Grozny.

As the Muslim call to prayer sounds out throughout the day from the local mosques, and the trees teem with natural life, Deni chats with groups of Pankisi men and women, who tend to socialise separated by gender, about their beliefs and dreams, with a good-humoured curiosity that is reciprocated in kind, but comes with relentless quizzing on when he will get married. The title comes from the final stage of development in larval metamorphosis, which sometimes never occurs. To become a Chechen man in Pankisi, there’s a clear route of respected tradition — but the crux for whether Déni can see a future blooming here, we come to understand, is the valley’s not so certain capacity to embrace variations on that path that have been nurtured in introspection and immigration. Unsensationalised in its gentle observations, but unflinching in its attention to what has previously been left unspoken, this is a film with a potent emotional undercurrent that is allowed to take its own time, through episodes, to build.

Director: Déni Oumar Pitsaev
Screenwriters: Mathilde Trichet, Déni Oumar Pitsaev
Producers: Geraldine Sprimont, Anne-Laure Guégan, Alexandra Mélot
Cinematographers: Joachim Philippe, Sylvain Verdet
Editors: Dounia Sichov, Laurent Sénéchal
Sound design: Emmanuel De Boissieu, Hélène Clerc-Denizot, Joseph Squire, Marie Paulus, André Rigaut
Production companies: Triptyque Films (France), Need Productions (Belgium)
Sales: Rediance
Venue: Sarajevo (Kinoscope)
In Chechen, Russian, Georgian
109 minutes

As of May 21, 2025, investigations made by the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) counted at least 180 journalists and media workers among the tens of thousands killed in Gaza since October 7, 2023. Fatma Hassona was one of those killed.

Watching those pixelated WhatsApp conversations unfold feels like eavesdropping on something profoundly private yet universally human. The film’s visuals defy traditional wartime documentaries (dozens of them have a war reporter for a subject) and thrive on imperfections — frozen frames, the garbled audio when bombs explode — all of which do not distract but rather pull you deeper into Fatma’s world.

The kind of journalism that Fatma is doing is different from that featured in dozens of documentaries about war reporters, many of whom are journalists assigned by high-flying institutions to head to the front, wherever it is; but for Fatma, the front is home, and the reported casualties are friends and family. Farsi humanizes Fatma as a young woman living in the Gaza Strip, a detail many are denying Palestinians. We can notice how she carefully selects a different colored hijab for each call, how her eyes light up when sharing her latest photographs (not just of ruins, but of children playing hopscotch in their shadow). These aren’t the details of a victim, but of a full, complex person – one who writes love songs, dreams of Italian gelato, and rolls her eyes at Farsi’s terrible Arabic pronunciation.

What makes the film so devastating is its quiet observation of how life continues even as death closes in, a haunting trauma that thousands in the Gaza Strip do not have the luxury to speak about. There’s no dramatic score telling the viewers how to feel when Fatma casually mentions that an aunt’s head was found three streets away from her body. No need for commentary when the camera suddenly swings to show smoke pouring from a building that had been standing minutes before. The power comes from Fatma’s matter-of-fact delivery: the way she explains warplanes are coming to kill them with the same tone someone might use to text a friend, updating them about how their date went.

On August 15, 2025, Fatma learned that the film would screen at Cannes. She and members of her family were killed the following day by an Israeli airstrike. The tragedy of Fatma’s death, coming just after learning her story will be seen by thousands of people, hangs over every frame. But what lingers isn’t the sorrow, it’s the vitality.

In an age of statistics and prime-time war coverage as entertainment, Farsi gives us something radical. Not a symbol or a statistic, but a person. Not a perfect heroine, but a real woman — funny, talented, flawed, and so vibrantly alive that when the postscript announces her death, it feels impossible. Because for 98 minutes, the presence of Fatma laughing, creating, surviving, is felt. And in that alchemy between filmmaker and subject, cinema becomes more than entertainment or even witness. It becomes a reminder to what we owe to each other, and an ode to resilience in the face of almost certain death.

Director, cinematography: Sepideh Farsi
With: Fatma Hassona, Sepideh Farsi
Producers: Sepideh Farsi, Javad Djavahery
Editors: Sepideh Farsi, Farahnaz Sharifi
Music: Cinna Peyghamy
Production company: Rêves d’eau Productions in association with 24images
World sales: Cercamon
Venue: Cannes Film Festival (ACID)
In English, Arabic
Running time: 110 minutes

As per the title, youth is once again central to the narrative, set in the directors’ home region of Liège in Belgium (specifically, shooting took place in the village of Banneux). Here, we follow the everyday routines of five young girls who are either in the late stages of pregnancy or already full-blown mothers. They live in a shelter that will help them figure out one of two outcomes: raise their child, alone or with a partner, or place them with a foster family. Ariane, for example, is hellbent on the latter option, despite the objections of her own mother (an alcoholic with questionable taste in men), who talked her out of getting an abortion.

For those who choose to raise their children, the organization provides aid in finding employment and a place to live, which is what happens to Perla, although she’s also looking at options that would be more convenient to her boyfriend. Julia is also searching for an apartment with her partner, with whom the whole experience – parenthood, cohabitation and their imminent wedding – is a big celebration of their shared triumph over a past of substance addiction. Jessica, who’s about two weeks away from giving birth, is trying to get in touch with her biological mother, who abandoned her years ago.

Always careful when it comes to casting, the Dardennes have assembled a diverse group of protagonists, with Lucie Laruelle (Perla) being a first-timer while Elsa Houben (Jessica) is effectively transitioning to more grown-up roles after many years as a child and teenage actress. They work well individually and as a team, giving the story a solid emotional core conveyed through the sometimes raw sincerity of their performances, with capable support from an adult cast that contains some familiar faces but no major names (the biggest one is French actress India Hair, whose screentime amounts to five minutes or less).

As they always do, the brothers – assisted for the third consecutive time by cinematographer Benoît Dervaux – follow these characters around with no fuss, capturing everything with naturalistic, handheld grace. This is sometimes at odds with the script’s more contrived moments, as some scenes featuring the adults get unnecessarily big in order to milk some additional drama, but such instances are outliers in a film that treads familiar ground but does so in a simpler manner compared to the Dardennes’ previous two films, which touched upon sensitive socio-political topics in a bit of a heavy-handed fashion.

This is a quieter, more subdued affair, which is at its best when it just lets the scenes breathe naturally and evolve organically, leading to at least two moments where this writer was moved by the culmination of the concerned story arcs. It’s a return to form for two filmmakers whose formula had reached a breaking point, and needed to get back to basics. To be born anew, if you will.

Directors & Screenwriters: Jean-Pierre Dardenne, Luc Dardenne
Cast: Babette Verbeek, Lucie Laruelle, Elsa Houben, Janaïna Halloy Fokan, India Hair, Claire Bodson, Christelle Cornil
Producers: Delphine Tomson, Jean-Pierre Dardenne, Luc Dardenne
Cinematography: Benoît Dervaux
Production design: Igor Gabriel
Costume design: Dorothée Guiraud
Sound: Jean-Pierre Duret, Valène Leroy, Thomas Gauder, Eric Grattepain
Production companies: Les Films du Fleuve, Archipel 35, The Reunion
World sales: Goodfellas
Venue: Cannes Film Festival (Competition)
In French
105 minutes

Beating The President’s Cake to this particular honour is Said Effendi. Making its bow at the Buñuel Theatre at the Palais on 15^th May – just a day before the unveiling of Cake at the Theatre Croisette – Kameran Hosni’s film depicts a schoolteacher’s struggle to maintain his composure and sanity when his rivalry with his rough cobbler neighbour turns tatty, then tragic, and finally transcendent.

A social realist piece laced with the odd stylistic flourish in its framing and editing, Hosni’s adaptation of novelist Edmond Sabri’s La Dispute (“The Fight”) is one of the unsung discoveries at Cannes this year. But neither Hosni nor Sabri were present at the festival, as they have both passed away – Said Effendi was produced and released for the first time in Iraq in 1957, when Iraq hosted one of the most burgeoning film industries in the Middle East, a fact that has largely been written out of history today.

Hosni’s magnificent mise-en-scène and his cast’s powerful performance was brought alive at the Cannes Classics programme in a pristine 4K restoration by the Iraqi Cinematheque, an institution established last year by the Iraqi government in collaboration with its French counterparts. Overseen by representatives of the Cinematheque, the restoration was conducted and completed at INA, the French national audio-visual institute.

“A lot of people [at the Cannes screening] were really shocked,” said Wareth Kwaish, the Iraqi filmmaker who led the restoration as the project director of the Iraqi Cinematheque. “People were saying, ‘How was there an Iraqi filmmaker making that good a film and we don’t know him?’”

Speaking to The Film Verdict at Iraq’s first-ever national pavilion at the Cannes Film Market, Kwaish said the restoration started just six months ago. Among the Iraqi Cinematheque’s inventory of 104 fictional features – all shot on 16mm or 35mm film stock from the 1940s to the 2000s – Said Effendi was chosen for its iconic status, and because of the presence of a high-quality negative and a release print with its optical soundtrack intact.

Kwaish brought 26 bobbins of material to Paris and supervised the restoration process, while also submitting the film to the classics section of the Cannes Film Festival. The screenings “really valorised the project and a lot of distribution offers came as well, and we are trying to choose one,” Kwaish said.

“[But] our focus now is to preserve these films, and then, of course, we will distribute them,” said Kwaish, who mentioned at a press conference in Baghdad in February that the Cinematheque is also restoring Iraq’s first-ever motion picture, Anwar Sha-ul’s  Alia and Issam (1948).

At Cannes, he told The Film Verdict that the Cinematheque has already agreed to work with CNC on a second project and “another Arab country” on a third. The Cinematheque plans to see in training workshops for young Iraqi archivists and conservationists later this year, with restoration projects to be eventually conducted in a newly constructed lab in Baghdad by the end of 2026.

Said Effendi was just one the few restored Asian gems to be given a new life in the Cannes Classics programme this year. Given how rarely these films were shown – if at all outside their home country – the festival audience might as well consider them as a discovery as the new films making their bow in the other sections at the festival.

The Mumbai-headquartered Film Heritage Foundation brought to Cannes the restoration of Days and Nights in the Forest, Satyajit Ray’s acerbic comedy about a quartet of men trying and floundering in flexing their city-slicker muscles during a fumbling vacation in a small town. A competition entry at the Berlinale in 1970, the film is much less known than Ray’s more familiar Apu trilogy.

Working with Martin Scorsese’s The Film Foundation and Janus Films/Criterion Collection, and with the access to camera and sound negatives held by rights owner Purnima Dutta, Film Heritage Foundation director Shivendra Singh Dungarpur oversaw an immaculate 4K version which premiered at Cannes. L’Immagine Ritrovata’s restoration reinvigorated the precision and modern ambience in the auteur’s satire about class, patriarchy and urban arrogance — aspects eulogised by director Wes Anderson, who spoke before the screening at Cannes.

Just as importantly, the Foundation — with the backing of the French government — also brought to Cannes The Girls, Sri Lanka’s first woman director Sumitra Peries’ 1978 debut about two young women from a poor family and their quashed dreams of love (with an upper-class boy) and success (as a beauty queen). Belying its seemingly tragic premise, The Girls offers nuances aplenty about the protagonists’ struggles for their own well-being and independence in life, with Peries punctuating her realist storytelling with some poetic mise-en-scène.

“The restoration was incredibly difficult and we had to work with three different elements of the film to bring [The Girls] back to its original glory. I only wish that Sumitra Peries was there with us to see the film,” said Dungarpur, whose restorations of Indian classics have been selected for Cannes Classics since 2022.

“I do believe [film industries in] Asia are becoming more active with restorations,” said Vincent Paul-Boncour, director of the Paris-based specialist distributor Carlotta Films. “What is important, from my point of view, is all this work [that is done] to reach new audiences and to be launched at film festivals.

“It’s not just saying how it’s good to have a movie at Cannes, but that you will reach the 100 people who will be important to the film’s travels as non-commercial releases at film festivals, but also the potential for commercial releases in theatres, VOD, DVD, Blu-ray boxed sets – not just to cinephiles but to a larger audience.”

Paul-Boncour was in Cannes to work on the presentation of a restored version of Edward Yang’s Yi Yi — A One and A Two. A Best Director prize-winner at Cannes in 2000, the film was digitised and released on home video in several territories (including a DVD published by Criterion Collection in 2006) and then vanished from view – especially after the Taiwanese auteur’s passing in 2007.

“We’ve been working for years on this,” said Paul-Boncour. “We knew it was [Japanese entertainment company] Pony Canyon who owned the rights, it was part of their catalogue, and they were doing nothing special. I’ve been going to see them at each market they were present in Asia, to tell them we were interested in the title. There was no 4K restoration and [Yang’s partner] Kaili Peng really pushed them because it would be the 25^th anniversary this year.”

As the French distributor of the restored Yi Yi, Paul-Boncour and his Carlotta team has helped Peng and Pony Canyon in securing berths in retrospectives at festivals in La Rochelle and the French Cinematheque, and also in republishing French critic Jean-Michel Frodon’s out-of-print book on the filmmaker.

More importantly, Carlotta also co-ordinated the press campaign for the restoration at Cannes, thus linking Pony Canyon with potential international licensers and festival programmers.

“It’s about how to have a strategy in exploring the movie – it’s not just to buy your film and put it on screen, but also to develop as much action with film festivals as possible,” Paul-Boncour said about his work on restoration projects. “We have to try to make an event, and to have many partners that could bring something stronger in the communication and promotion aspect.”

Paul-Boncour said he’s developing another project with Japanese auteur Seijun Suzuki’s films. At the same time, he has also been scouting for possible projects in Vietnam, where few films have yet to be restored by either its national institutions or international outfits. He compared his new adventure as similar to his work on the 4K restoration of Philippine auteur Lino Brocka’s Bona: working with U.S.-Hong Kong-based specialist label Kani Releasing, Paul-Boncour helped locate the film’s rights owners, oversaw its restoration, and ushered it to Cannes Classics last year.

“For Vietnam, you have to go there to meet rights owners, to show them what you’re doing,” he said. “They won’t come to you because they do things differently -– they might think it’s strange somebody from France or the UK could be interested to release all these titles from the 1970s and 1980s, when people [there] are mostly interested in new things on their iPhones… These are territories where the market for physical objects like Blu Ray doesn’t even exist.”

While there’s certainly competition from distributors from the same territory for the rights of certain films, he said, he is open to collaborations with his peers from outside France.

“We could sometimes work together, like on Bona, to make things happen,” he said. “If you are doing it just by yourself, it would cost more –- but it’s also nice to collaborate, as it inspires real creativity… It’s always good to see that even in some small ways, the work you made for your territory could also serve the rest of the world.”

But few voices were raised speaking about the wider world outside. At the opening ceremony, where he received an honorary Palme d’Or from the festival presented by Leonardo DiCaprio, Robert De Niro launched a pungent critique of U.S. president Donald Trump and won the applause of the Lumière theatre. Americans are “fighting like hell for a democracy we once took for granted”, he said. “Art looks for truth. Art embraces diversity. That’s why art is a threat.”

Highlights of This Year’s Program

Movies have long been seen as a threat in Iran, where both Iranian directors in competition (Jafar Panahi and Saeed Roustaee) have been hit with prison sentences for their work. Panahi has long resisted the ban that was put on his filmmaking by shooting without official permission in secret, and even if It Was Just an Accident failed to turn on most viewers the same way as some earlier films, no one objected to awarding it the Palme d’Or for Best Film. Its outspoken fury at jailing people for their political beliefs and its explicit description of torture in prison once again showed how fearless Panahi is in the face of very real threats to his liberty. The film is also one of the first to accurately show women appearing in public without covering their hair, a trend that has come out of the Woman Life Freedom movement.

Another big winner was the well-liked Brazilian cross-genre thriller, The Secret Agent, which won both Best Director for Kleber Mendonça Filho and Best Performance by an Actor from Walter Moura. This dark gangster film told at breakneck pace is an exciting watch, but its festival credentials come from the story of a man (played by a deeply melancholy Moura) running for his life during the days of the dictatorship. Though some found it opaque, it was one of the most flamboyant entries in this year’s competition.

Another is The Little Sister, Hafsia Herzi’s joyful lesbian coming-out drama of a young woman (Nadia Melliti) struggling to reconcile her sexuality and her deep Islamic faith. Melliti’s win as Best Actress was an excellent choice by a jury presided over by Juliette Binoche.

Among three experimental titles that took home prizes are Chinese director Bi Gan’s dense hymn to cinema Resurrection (Special Award) and the two films that split the Jury Prize ex-aequo, Olivier Laxe’s Sirat from Spain and Mascha Schilinski’s Sound of Falling. Though their films divided audiences, these fresh voices can be counted on being heard again in the coming years.

The film selection in the other sections was strong overall. In Un Certain Regard, The Mysterious Gaze of the Flamingo by Diego Céspedes won the top prize and A Poet by Simon Mesa Soto the Jury Prize. Both were well-liked films with audience buzz. Also mentioned at the prize ceremony were the well-liked Norah directed by Tawfik Alzaidi and My Father’s Shadow by Akinola Davies Jr.

Over in Directors’ Fortnight, new filmmaker Hasan Hadi won the prestigious Camera d’Or for The President’s Cake, and Lee Sang-il’s Kokuho was a noted as a visually striking and accessible tale of Kabuki theater. Meanwhile, Critics’ Week awarded its Grand Prize to A Useful Ghost by Rathapoorn Boombunchachoke, and Imago, Kika and Reedland were much admired.

Japan Leads the Asian Selection

After years of playing second fiddle to South Korea – or maybe even third and fourth, if China and India are included – Japanese cinema returned to the Croisette with a vengeance. Its presence was felt in nearly every section at the festival this year. Just as impressive, however, is the stylistic and geographical diversity of these films.

There’s Chie Hayakawa’s 1980s-set family drama Renoir in competition and Kei Ishigawa’s multiple-timeline, continent-hopping adaptation of Kazuo Ishiguro’s A Pale View of Hills in Un Certain Regard. The Directors’ Fortnight hosted veteran Korean-Japanese auteur Lee Sang-il’s celebration of the traditional art of kabuki in Kokuho (“National Treasure”) and 26-year-old Yuiga Danzuka’s Tokyo-set Brand New Landscape. In Cannes Classics, Mikio Naruse’s 1955 masterpiece, Drifting Clouds, reappeared in a 4K restoration.

At the extreme end of things was the midnight screening title Exit 8, a live-action adaptation of a cult video game by novelist-filmmaker Genki Kawamura. The breakout Japanese filmmaker at Cannes this year, however, was the Tokyo-born, Le Fresnoy graduate Momoko Seto. Her first feature, Dandelion’s Odyssey, is a cross between a precise scientific documentary and a Pixar animation movie, as we follow four dandelion seedlings flight from an apocalyptic planet and their search for fertile soil away from their home. The standing ovation she received after the film’s premiere in Critics’ Week could put some of the competition titles to shame.

Such universal acclaim was beyond Bi Gan, whose Resurrection perhaps ranks as the most polarizing film in the running for the Palme d’Or this year. While the press shows ended half-empty, the gala screening at the Lumiere Theatre next door finished with the audience giving the Chinese filmmaker long, rapturous applause. Nearly three hour’s long, this film maudit spans wildly different styles (from silent movies to noir, and from surrealism to social realism) in its five chapters, at once an indecipherable historical epic and a phantasmagoric salute to the history of cinema.

The breakout Korean star at Cannes this year is actually French. Well-known for her leading role in Davy Chou’s Return to Seoul, Park Ji-min – who was born in South Korea but relocated to France as a baby – appeared in three films directed by women. While her roles in Rebecca Zlotowski’s out-of-competition A Private Life and Anna Cazenave Cambet’s UCR entry Love Me Tender are relatively minor, she delivered a powerful performance opposite Nadia Melliti in Hafsia Herzi’s The Little Sister. 

A Final Mysterious Incident

In the end, the most talked-about incident of the 78th edition was one the festival would happily have done without. On the last day, at 10.02 AM local time, a region-wide power outage — which lasted until late afternoon and shut down Cannes stores and restaurants — disrupted all the screenings scheduled at the Cinéum multiplex and scotched the traditional Official Selection reruns. In a fitting metaphor for how Cannes positions itself in the festival ecosystem, the Palais and its theaters were still functional, thanks to having their own backup generator, and stood as the lone beacon of light in the middle of a darkened city that at times resembled the post-apocalyptic London in Danny Boyle’s 28 Days Later.

–Deborah Young, Clarence Tsui and Max Borg contributed to this story

Once again, the star is Swedish actor Fares Fares, here playing a movie star who gets conscripted into a government propaganda film, where he plays the president and his glorious rise to power. There is certainly room for dark humor here, yet most of the story is deadly serious and even quite frightening, given the rapidly changing world order that makes almost anything seem possible from state surveillance of the creative process and media control to a violent coup. The film has a bold, stripped-down look in places and a retro feel in others that can be interpreted as weirdly campy, but it is hard to look away from the well-developed storyline as it circles around corrupt ministers, overt spies and honey traps, without counting a major plot twist three-quarters through the film.

Given the delicate balance filmmakers have to strike in Egypt to get financing and avoid censorship, the question arises how Saleh managed to shoot such a script in the first place. The answer is he is a Swedish director of Egyptian origin, backed by Swedish production companies linked to France’s Memento and Germany’s Films Boutique. The film was shot in Istanbul with Swedish and French actors and produced on a hefty budget of €9 million. Outside of France and Scandinavia, it could find interest among adventurous viewers.

As can be seen in the first two films of the trilogy, the filmmakers get a lot right about the atmosphere of Cairo’s political, military and religious elites. The Nile Hilton Incident from 2017 is set during Egypt’s freedom revolution and the collapse of the Mubarek regime. Fares appears in the main role as a detective. Walad Min Al Janna (aka Cairo Conspiracy and Boy from Heaven), released in 2022, is highly critical of the religious establishment, uncovering corruption hidden among the faithful. In this one Fares plays a state security agent spying on a famous mosque. The film won best screenplay at Cannes.

In Eagles, Fares is every inch a star as George Fahmy, whose striking face and mellow cool has earned him enormous popularity. His personal life is a colorful mess: he has divorced Rula, an actress who is the mother of his teenage son, and is living with a rising star half his age, played with calculated glamour by Lyna Khourdi. They both seem aware their relationship is not fated to last, and when George meets the alluring intellectual sophisticate Suzanne (Zineb Triki), he doesn’t hesitate to flirt. This, in spite of the fact dhe is the wife of an army general, the Minister of Defense. Things get complicated quickly.

It’s a tough career moment, too, when George finds his personal trailer removed from the studio lot. As his agent explains, he has received an offer he can’t afford to refuse: to play the current president in a fawning biopic, even though George is tall, handsome, and has a full head of hair and so bears zero resemblance to Al-Sisi. Additionally humiliating is the presence of the president’s right-hand man on the set, Dr. Mansour (Amr Waked), whose role extends to rewriting scenes he doesn’t like and demanding fresh takes.

Fares brings not only true professionalism but measured reactions that keep him sympathetic no matter how many compromises he is forced to make on the farcical movie. Driving around town in his beat-up old car is a sign of defiance, showing that beneath the movie star veneer lies a real person. Even in the key scene at a military academy, where George is scheduled to give an adulatory address in the presence of the president and his chiefs of staff, and where all hell breaks loose, he is never trite or predictable. From this moment on the story changes register and coasts to a startling but realistic finale.

Cinematographer Pierre Aim concludes his work on the trilogy making a strong statement with stark images of military might that could be inspired by Leni Riefenstahl. In the more glamorous scenes of swanky parties and 5-star hotels, there is a pointed over-abundance that characterizes the ostentatious rich. Kudos to editor Theis Schmidt for the edge-of-seat pacing and the clever insertion of Al-Sisi’s familiar figure into the fictional scenes.

Director, screenplay: Tarik Saleh
Producers: Linus Stohr Torell, Linda Mutawi, Johan Lindstrom, Alexandre Mallet-Guy.
Cast: Fares Fares, Zineb Triki, Lyna Khourdi, Amr Waked, Cherien Dabis, Sherwan Haji, Suhaib Nashwan
Cinematography: Pierre Aim
Editing: Theis Schmidt
Production design: Roger Rosenberg
Costume design: Virginie Montel
Music: Alexandre Desplat
Sound: Hans Moeller
Production companies: Unlimited Stories (Sweden), Apparaten (Sweden), Memento Production (France) in association with Strom Pictures (Denmark), Bufo (Finland), Films Boutique (Germany)
World Sales: Playtime
Venue: Cannes Film Festival (Competition)
In Arabic
 127 minutes

PALME D’OR for Best Film to:
It Was Just an Accident
by Jahar Panahi  (Iran)

GRAND PRIX to:
Joachim Trier for the film
Sentimental Value (Denmark)

JURY PRIZE EX AEQUO to:
Olivier Laxe for
Sirat (Spain)

Mascha Schilinski for
Sound of Falling  (Germany)

BEST DIRECTOR to:
Kleber Mendoca Filho
for the film The Secret Agent  (Brazil)

BEST PERFORMANCE BY AN ACTOR to:
Walter Moura
for the film  The Secret Agent  (Brazil)

BEST PERFORMANCE BY AN ACTRESS to:
Nadia Melliti
For the film Le Petite Derniere

BEST SCREENPLAY to:
Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne
for Young Mothers  (Belgium)

SPECIAL AWARD
Bi Gan
for the film Resurrection  (China)

SHORT FILMS COMPETITION

PALME D’OR
I’m Glad You’re Dead Now
by  Tawfeek Barhom

SPECIAL MENTION to:
Ali
by Adnan Al Rajeev

UN CERTAIN REGARD

UN CERTAIN REGARD PRIZE to:
The Mysterious Gaze of the Flamingo
Diego Céspedes

JURY PRIZE to:
A Poet by Simón Mesa Soto

BEST DIRECTOR  to:
Tarzan and Arab Nasser
For the film Once Upon a Time in Gaza

BEST ACTRESS
Cléo Diara
for the film I Only Rest in the Storm

BEST ACTOR
Frank Dillane
for the film Urchin

BEST SCREENPLAY
Harry Lighton
for the film Pillion

Special Mention:
Norah
by Tawfik Alzaidi

CAMERA D’OR PRIZE
The President’s Cake
by Hasan Hadi

SPECIAL MENTION
My Father’s Shadow
by Akinola Davies Jr.

CRITICS’ WEEK

Grand Prize:
A Useful Ghost
by Ratchapoom Boonbunchachoke

While he was dying of TB in Scotland in 1949, the visionary English writer George Orwell finished his most memorable and chillingly prescient novel, 1984. It was a despairing warning to the post-war world that authoritarianism was still going to be a threat in the future. The book launched frightening new socio-political concepts interpolated from contemporary societies and magnified to absurd conclusions: Big Brother, the thought police, double speak, thought crimes, and much more. Today it is apparent these are not sci-fi fantasies channeled from the distant future but the here-and-now, which can justifiably be called an Orwellian world.

The writer is the nominal subject of this biography, but his ideas are spun out far and wide. A multitude of cameramen capture the many images, interviews, newsreels, even political works of art that the silence and beauty of the island of Jura off the coast of Scotland, where the story of the writer’s final years is told as he goes in and out of clinics and hospitals. The book he is struggling to finish is 1984, set in the totalitarian country of Oceania where the ruling party watches and controls every aspect of its citizens’ lives. Peck examines the party’s slogans (“war is peace, freedom is slavery, ignorance is strength”) one by one to illustrate the rise of fascism. War is Peace sparks scenes of President George Bush declaring war on Iraq, Russia invading Ukraine, Israel Gaza. Ignorance is Strength is compared to misinformation and fake news, banned books and so on.

Exemplifying as he does so many aspects of the omnipresent Big Brother agenda, Donald Trump occupies numerous scenes. However, most of these deal with the well-trodden territory of his first term in office and the Capitol insurrection on January 6, 2021, which after all the shocks of the second term seem like ancient history. But the viewer will have no trouble updating the picture to include recent events.

Throughout the film, excerpts from various screen versions of 1984, especially scenes of Winston being tortured until he truly believes that his torturer is holding up five fingers instead of four, and through this indoctrination it becomes his deep inner conviction that 2+2=5.

The text is based on Orwell’s letters and writings, many reflecting on the earlier stages of his life, his parents, boarding school (he attended Eton), military career in the colonies, his marriage and remarriage. These reflections – some poignant, some humorous, often self-critical – are expertly voiced by Damian Lewis, who brings the writer as close to the viewer as is possible. Still there is always a sense of unbreachable privacy in the letters, making them less revelatory than might be desired.

Little time is spent delving into he problematic side of Orwell’s personality (he has been called a snob and a colonialist as well as accused of sexism and homophobia), which would have rounded out his portrait considerably. Likewise, the early novels and other writing are barely touched on, apart from some scenes from films based on Animal Farm, his allegory of Stalinism in Russia.

Peck was clearly pressed to find an ending, given the downbeat bleakness of the novel’s final pages, and he finds it in Orwell’s professed hope in the power of the “proles”, the common people, “those swarming disregarded masses,” to destroy the Party. But after all the horrors that have gone before, it remains faint comfort in the midst of these dark days.

Director, screenplay: Raoul Peck
Producers: George Chignell, Alex Gibney, Raoul Peck, Nick Shumaker
With: Damian Lewis (voice of George Orwell)
Cinematography: Benjamin Bloodwell, Stuart Luck, Julian Schwanitz
Editor: Alexandra Strauss
Music: Alexei Aigui
Sound editor: Benoit Hillebrant
Production companies: Jigsaw Productions, Velvet Film
World Sales: Goodfellas
Venue: Cannes Film Festival (Cannes Première)
In English
119 minutes

Basada en su propio viaje adolescente a Galicia para descubrir la vida secreta de sus padres biológicos fallecidos tiempo atrás, Carla Simón ofrece un retrato sensible de una familia disfuncional que se desmorona por los cismas internos provocados por el choque entre los mayores conservadores y los hijos traumatizados.

A pesar de estar ligeramente lastrada por un tercer acto estilísticamente discordante, Romería sigue siendo una película que te atrapa de principio a fin, con Simón dotando  la narrativa con gestos delicados y minuciosos detalles de diseño que ayudan al espectador a orientarse sobre los personajes y las líneas de tiempo paralelas.

Romería, en competencia en Cannes, podría considerarse el intento de Simón de fusionar el enfoque autobiográfico de su primer largometraje, Verano 1993 (que gira en torno a la lucha de una niña por adaptarse a su nueva vida en el campo tras la muerte de su madre) con la crítica mordaz al capitalismo que subyace en su película ganadora del Oso de Oro, Alcarràs (en la que una familia intenta sobrevivir a la desaparición de su granja). Con este tercer largometraje, Simón logra separar sutilmente lo histórico y político de lo personal, al reflexionar sobre cómo las normas sociales del pasado siguen influyendo en españoles de diferentes generaciones, incluso en una época en la que el país es nominalmente libre.

En español, “romería” se refiere a una peregrinación religiosa. Y eso es lo que emprende Marina (Llúcia García), una aspirante a cineasta que regresa a Vigo, la ciudad natal de su padre, en Galicia en el verano de 2004, para tramitar su solicitud de beca en la escuela de cine.  Pronto descubre que su padre —y, por lo tanto, ella misma— no existen legalmente, ya que sus nombres no figuran en los documentos familiares del registro civil.

A medida que lo que debería ser un trámite administrativo rutinario se complica, la visita a la familia de su padre se convierte en una inmersión profunda en la saga familiar. Si bien el primer encuentro con el aparentemente adinerado y afable tío Lois (Tristán Ulloa) y su familia es cálido y cordial, el encuentro con el clan resulta incómodo desde el principio. “La familia está aquí”, dice Lois con un desdén apenas disimulado, mientras sus hermanos organizan una pomposa fiesta de bienvenida en alta mar para su sobrina, distanciada desde hace mucho tiempo.

A medida que Marina conversa con cada uno de sus tíos y tías, se da cuenta poco a poco de la mala relación que existe entre ellos, a la vez que descubre detalles sobre cómo trataron a su padre cuando estaba en fase terminal. A través de las pláticas informales con sus primos —en concreto, Nuño (Mitch), el hijo mayor de Lois, a quien Marina  se acerca cada vez más—, se entera de cómo su padre, Alfonso (o “Fon”, como siempre lo llama Marina), fue ocultado de la vista pública, condenado al ostracismo incluso por sus propios parientes por la enfermedad supuestamente vergonzosa que padecía.

Marina finalmente comprende el origen de la angustia que convirtió a sus  tíos en almas tan peculiares y dañadas. Al llegar a casa familiar, conoce a su abuela paterna, una hipocondríaca malvada y obsesionada con la realeza, que jamás tiene una palabra amable para nadie (“Tus hijos son unos salvajes”, le dice a la esposa de Lois, mientras se dirige a la piscina con sus tacones para reprender a sus nietos por no ducharse antes de meterse en ella). Su abuelo, por su parte, es un reaccionario que afirma que si la España moderna “desapareciera, el mundo sería un lugar mejor”; preside un ritual en el que los jóvenes deben hacer fila para saludarlo, tras lo cual les entrega un billete de 50 euros como recompensa.

En lugar de darle un billete a Marina, el abuelo le entrega un sobre grueso, diciéndole que con eso le bastará para sus estudios; un gesto apenas disimulado que significa su negativa a cambiar los documentos oficialesm devolver el apellido a Fon (y a  Marina) y regresarlos al seno familiar. Furiosa, Marina finalmente deja de lado su reverencia, lo que desencadena su propia rebelión contra la familia y la lleva a una epifanía sobre la espiral de la vida de sus padres hacia la ruina y la muerte.

En Romería, Simón maneja su historia en múltiples niveles a la vez. Además de la narrativa principal —filmada dinámicamente por la directora de fotografía francesa Hélène Louvart, en Cannes también se presenta su trabajo fotográfico en Eleanor the Great de Scarlett Johansson—, Simón también utiliza material de vídeo supuestamente grabado por Marina, así como una voz en off que lee las anotaciones del diario de su madre sobre su vida feliz en Galicia.

Esos brillantes recuerdos de los buenos tiempos se ven rápidamente cuestionados en el fantástico eje central de la película, ya que Simón abandona su característico realismo y ofrece una delirante reconstrucción de las atribuladas vidas de los padres de Marina, sumidos en la neblina de las drogas. A pesar de sus atractivas imágenes, esa secuencia sobrecarga la película con información que es mejor dejar a la imaginación del espectador; después de todo, Romería se configura como la investigación de un secreto familiar por parte de una nieta pródiga, y la verdad debería revelarse a través de las delicadas sutilezas y las revelaciones pausadas de Simón. Por otra parte, con el dossier de prensa describiendo Romería como la última parte de su “ciclo familiar”, este es quizás el intento de la directora de confrontar sus demonios personales antes de pasar finalmente a nuevas pastos e historias. En ese sentido, la compleja interpretación de García —una mezcla de reticencia, persistencia y angustia contenida— ofrece a Simón la mejor manera de traducir todas las ansiedades y angustias de Marina (o las suyas propias) a la pantalla.

Dirección y guion: Carla Simón
Producción: María Zamora
Reparto: Llúcia García, Mitch, Tristán Ulloa, Sara Casasnovas
Fotografía: Hélène Louvart
Editor: Sergio Jiménez
Diseñadora de producción: Mónica Bernuy
Música: Ernest Pipó
Diseñadora de sonido: Eva Valino
Compañía productora: Elástica Films
Ventas internacionales: MK2 Films
Muestra: Cannes Film Festival (Competencia)
En español y francés
115 minutos

Writing the script with his regular collaborator Eskil Vogt, Trier focuses on a world he knows very well: filmmaking. Although at first we enter this universe through the prism of stage acting, as Nora Borg (Reinsve), an accomplished performer, is about to make her entrance and gets bogged down by various little annoyances, hinting at unresolved psychological issues that manifest themselves through neuroses that feed her art. As it turns out, she recently lost her mother, and her childhood was not always a happy one, due to an increasingly deteriorating relationship between her parents which culminated in her Swedish-born father returning to his home country.

Then, all of a sudden, Gustav (Stellan Skarsgård) returns, having decided to make his comeback as a film director after a long hiatus. Not only is he being honored with a retrospective in France, he actually has a script he intends to get off the ground. The plan is to shoot in the old family house (which he technically still owns, since there was no paperwork involved when he left it to his ex-wife), and the lead role – loosely based on his own mother – is one he wrote with Nora in mind. She turns him down immediately, having no intention of ever working with him. The project eventually turns into a Netflix-backed, English-language film starring Rachel Kemp (Elle Fanning), with whom Gustav bonded at the event in France.

As the border between the fictional and the personal gets increasingly thinner, Nora and her younger sister Agnes (Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas) ponder their bond with Gustav, the absent father who now wishes to reconnect with the whole family, especially his young grandson. There are clear echoes of the life of Ingmar Bergman, who was notoriously not great with his own offspring (sometimes even forgetting exactly how many children he actually had), but Trier approaches the heavier subjects with a warmer gaze, finding subtle grace notes even in the most uncomfortable exchanges between two generations struggling to find common ground after decades of estrangement (as established through voiceover, Gustav and Nora are the exact same age as their portrayers, and one can assume the same applies to the other characters as well).

The family angle and the notion of home (the title refers to the state of the house and its contents in the wake of the recent death) are central to the drama’s emotional arc, exquisitely captured by cinematographer Kasper Tuxen through a careful balance of close-ups and wider shots and a great sense of spatial awareness as the relatively humble abode becomes a character in its own right. The film never shies away from being honest about the connections it’s depicting, while also indulging in a bit of cinematic shorthand that feels wholly appropriate in the context of a story about a filmmaking family (of sorts).

In fact, there’s a whole other layer to proceedings courtesy of the film within the film, a Norwegian project directed by a Swede and produced by a Dane (Jesper Christensen), a perhaps imperceptible nuance if one is not familiar with the difference between the three languages, but nonetheless a vital one as it highlights the true nature of a lot of Scandinavian projects, often made in producing partnership between at least two of the countries (in this specific case, the actual Sentimental Value boasts Danish participation behind the scenes, but not Swedish).

The casting of Skarsgård, who often acts in Norwegian films due to the general mutual intelligibility with Swedish, is a masterstroke in that regard, as he gets to show facets of his performing personality that are not always present in his Hollywood roles (and with his friend Lars’s career potentially over due to health issues, it’s good to see he’s found another Trier who can use him to his full potential). This makes Fanning’s role especially amusing, as she gamely plays an external element whose outsider status is openly recognized, complete with jabs at American streamers and their habit of backing prestige projects that will perhaps never see the inside of a movie theater. Fortunately, this one will. And not just at festivals.

Director: Joachim Trier
Screenwriters: Joachim Trier, Eskil Vogt
Cast: Renate Reinsve, Stellan Skarsgård, Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas, Elle Fanning, Jesper Christensen
Producers: Maria Ekerhovd, Andrea Berentsen Ottmar
Cinematography: Kasper Tuxen
Production design: Jørgen Stangebye Larsen
Costume design: Ellen Ystehede
Music: Hania Rani
Sound: Gisle Tveito, Helge Bodøgaard
Production companies: Mer Film AS, Eye Eye Pictures, Lumen, Komplizen Film, BBC Film, Zentropa, MK Films
World sales: MK2
Venue: Cannes Film Festival (Competition)
In Norwegian, Swedish, English, Danish
135 minutes

Roustaee’s films found crossover potential to international film festival audiences after the heart-stopping cops vs. opium dealers thriller Just 6.5 (aka Law of Tehran) opened in Venice in 2019 and the exquisitely paced and acted social drama Leila’s Brothers made it to competition in Cannes in 2022, where it won a Fipresci award.

Then in 2023, the director found himself sentenced to six months in prison by the Islamic Revolutionary Court. The charge was sending Leila’s Brothers to Cannes and thereby participating in “propaganda against the Islamic system.” The sentence included completing a course on “creating movies aligned with national interests and national morality”.

Surely Woman and Child, an intricate Iranian family story that shows people at their worst and most vengeful, must still be considered something of a critical outsider  at home, though hopefully it will not be banned nationally as the rowdy and despairing Leila’s Brothers was. It begins with Mahnaz (Parinaz Izadyar), a pretty and vivacious nurse at a big city hospital who has been left with two kids to raise after her husband died. Now, at 40, she would like to remarry and the choice falls on an amusingly jolly but unfaithful ambulance driver, Hamid (another Roustaee regular, Payman Maadi). A two-day “marriage proposal ceremony” is coming up with Hamid’s parents visiting, but Mahnaz has not told her kids yet (“I’m waiting for the right moment”), nor are Hamid’s folks aware that she has children, so the web of lies begins to grow into a classic Iranian drama.

Another energetic character is her 14-year-old son Aliyar (newcomer Sinan Mohebi, excellent), who runs over rooftops like a cat, cutting his classes to hold improv clandestine betting sessions at a nearby vocational school. Added to his wisecracks in class and general misbehavior, it prompts the principal, Mr. Samkhanian, to expel him over Mahnaz’s pleas for “one more chance”.

Home life is never calm with the nervously aggressive wild child around. Yet it is a bright and loving family. A running joke is that Aliyar is paid by his wily granny to do her adult education homework, but he subcontracts it, along with his own, to his 8-year-old sister Neda (Arshida Dorostkar). In any case Aliyar is smart but dangerous and completely out of control. The music and dark colors communicate a strong sense of foreboding that suggests something dire is going to happen soon.

Tragedy strikes while Aliyar and his sister are staying at their paternal grandfather’s apartment on the weekend their mother is getting secretly engaged. Hassan Pourshirazi is another striking actor who turns the grandfather into a sick but menacing figure, one who will play a key role in the early disappearance of Aliyar from the film.

More trouble is piled on: Mahnaz’s marriage to Hamid is called off for the most galling of reasons, involving her younger sister Mehri (Soha Niasti). While the family gradually adapts to the new reality, Mahnaz is devastated and inconsolable, unable to work and popping handfuls of pills to stem the grief. A terror to her family, she is particularly unfair to little Neda, who is said to have white hairs at eight, which she plucks so as not to distress her mother.

At this point the film becomes full-on melodrama as Mahnaz disintegrates before our eyes from a self-confident professional woman to a wild-eyed, inconsolable fury hell-bent on getting revenge for what has happened. In her attempt to blame and punish anyone and everyone (but herself), she is both pitiable and to be feared as she turns into a raging Medea. For those who like their stories heavily spiced and their acting shrill and stage-worthy, the second half of Woman and Child should fill the bill.

Director, screenplay: Saeed Roustaee
Cast: Parinaz Izadyar, Soha Niasti, Fereshteh Sadr Orafaee, Sinan Mohebi, Payman Maadi, Maziar Seyedi, Hassan Pourshirazi, Arshida Dorostkar 
Producers: Eva Dottelonde, Livia van der Staay
Cinematography: Adib Sobhani
Editing: Bahram Dehghani
Music: Ramin Kousha
Sound: Rashid Daneshmand
Production companies: Boshra Film (Iran), Iris Film (Iran) in association with Goodfellas (France)
World Sales: Goodfellas
Venue: Cannes Film Festival (Competition)
In Farsi
131 minutes

A few miles down the road, their car breaks down, setting off a shattering chain reaction of events that will change their lives forever.

This ugly accident opens the latest tale out of today’s Iran by Jafar Panahi, the Iranian filmmaker who has done several stints in jail as a political prisoner as well as being banned from filmmaking and forbidden to leave the country (the latter possibility was explored and rejected in his 2022 No Bears, which won the Special Jury Prize at Venice.)

Like the director’s previous work, It Was Just an Accident masterfully mixes humor and tenderness with anger and drama, while it raises the stakes in openly attacking the Iranian regime and the violence it perpetrates on its citizens. But in this case  the characters’ suffering is largely kept on screen, distant from the audiences. The relatively simplistic storytelling (for a filmmaker known for highly layered work) can also feel like it’s underperforming cinematically and emotionally.

In the end, it is Panahi’s outspoken political commentary on the Iranian regime that will win this fable-like tale prizes at festivals and access to theatrical audiences. The film’s unique value lies in its choice to focus on the lasting psychological damage done to the victims of torture and their fantasies of revenge on their captors. If only they could find them.

Vahid (Vahid Mobasseri) is working late in a car rental garage when he hears a sound that chills him to the bone. It is the sound of a man with a prosthetic leg that squeaks as he walks. Though Vahid was always blindfolded in prison, he recognizes the torturer who broke his back by the nightmarish sound of “Peg-Leg” coming to interrogate and beat him. The next day, in town, in broad daylight, he finds Peg-Leg’s car and somehow manages to knock him out and tie him up. He acts instinctively, driven by hatred and anger. He has no plan, except to drive his van and its unconscious passenger to the desert.

Of course, we recognize Peg-Leg as the man (Ebrahim Azizi) who hit the dog, and whose car broke down shortly afterwards. His terrified protests of innocence to Vahid ring true. He has a pregnant wife, a young daughter. He lost his leg, he claims, a year ago in an accident. Even Vahid has his doubts, and just as he starts to bury his torturer alive in a deep hole he has dug in the sand, he hesitates. Maybe he should get a second opinion?

From this point the story turns into a classic fable. First Vahid tries to persuade a book seller who was in prison with him to identify the man, but he refuses point blank and tells him to ask Shiva (Mariam Afshari), who is another ex-prisoner. Vahid finds her working as a wedding photographer and she passes the buck to wild man Hamid (Mohamad Ali Elyasmehr). In a farcical turn, the whole crew including a bride Goli (Hadis Pakbaten) and groom (Majid Panahi) dressed in their finery pile into the back of the van with Peg-Leg lying tied up in a coffin-like case, while they furiously debate what to do with the body, The Trouble with Harry-style.

The one thing sure is that no one reacts logically, and when their captive gets a call that his wife has fainted on the kitchen floor, the crew of avengers shows their moral superiority by getting involved, whatever the consequences. There are some impassioned moments in the last scene, where the lasting price of torture is bitterly recounted, and a final twist that offers some clarity but no closure. It seems the chilling sound of a squeaking artificial leg is doomed to haunt Vahid forever.

Director, screenplay: Jafar Panahi
Producers: Jafar Panahi, Philippe Martin
Cast: Vahid Mobasseri, Ebrahim Azizi, Mariam Afshari, Hadis Pakbaten, Majid Panahi, Mohamad Ali Elyasmehr
Cinematography: Amin Jafari
Editing: Amir Etminan
Production design: Leila Naghdi
Production companies: Jafar Panahi Prods.,Les Films Pelléas in association with Bidibul Prods., Pio & Co., Arte France Cinéma
World Sales: MK2 Films
Venue: Cannes Film Festival (Competition)
In Farsi
105 minutes

Based on her own teenage journey to Galicia to discover her long-deceased biological parents’ secret lives, Spanish director Carla Simón offers a sensitive portrait of a dysfunctional family bursting at the seams because of the internal schisms brought about by the clash between conservative elders and their traumatized offspring. Despite being slightly weighed down by a stylistically jarring third act, Romeria remains a gripping watch throughout, with Simón lacing with narrative with delicate gestures and minute design details that help the viewer establish their bearings about the characters and the parallel timelines.

Bowing in competition in Cannes, Romeria could be seen as Simón’s attempt to amalgamate the autobiographical touch of her first feature Summer 1993 (which revolves around a girl’s struggle to adapt to life with her new life in the countryside after the death of her mother) and the cutting critique of capitalism underlining her Berlinale prize-winner Alcarràs (in which a family’s attempt to survive the demise of their farm). With this third feature, Simón manages to subtly tease the historical and political out of the personal, as she looks back on how the social norms of the past maintain their hold over Spaniards of different generations, even in an era when the country is nominally free.

In Spanish, “romería” refers to a religious pilgrimage. And that’s what Marina (Llúcia Garcia) embarks on, an aspiring filmmaker returning to her father’s Galician hometown Vigo to get some paperwork for her application for a scholarship in film school in the summer of 2004. Somehow, she discovers her father – and thus herself – doesn’t exist in law, as their names aren’t somehow left out in the family documents in the civil registry.

As what should have been a mundane administrative process turns tricky, the visit to her father’s family becomes a deep dive into a family saga. While the first encounter with the seemingly well-off and mild-mannered uncle Lois (Tristán Ulloa) and his family is warm and convivial, the meeting with the clan is awkward from the start. “The family are here,” Lois says with barely disguised disdain, as his siblings put on a pompous welcoming-party-on-sea for their long-estranged niece.

As Marina gets to converse with each of her uncles and aunts, she gradually realises the bad blood flowing between them, while learning bits and pieces about the way her father was treated when he was terminally ill. Through the loose talk from his cousins – specifically Lois’ eldest son Nuno (Mitch), with whom Marina becomes increasingly close – she learns of how his father Alfonso (or “Fon”, as Marina always refers him to) was hidden away from public view, ostracised by even his own kin for the supposedly shameful disease he was suffering from.

Marina eventually understands the source of anguish which made her aunts and uncle such idiosyncratic, damaged souls. Arriving at the family home, she meets her paternal grandmother, a mean, royalty-obsessed hypochondriac with ne’er a good word said for anyone (“Your kids are wild,” she says to Lois’ wife, as she then struts to the swimming pool in her high-heels to chastise her grandchildren for not showering before jumping in). Her grandfather, meanwhile, is a reactionary who claims that if modern Spain “disappeared, the world will be a better place”; he presides over a ritual in which the young ones have to line up to greet him, after which he will bestow them a 50-euro note as reward.

Rather than peeling a single bill for Marina, the grandfather shoves her a thick envelope, telling her this will be enough for her studies – a thinly-veiled gesture signifying his refusal to change those official documents and return Fon’s (and Marina’s) name to the family fold. Seething with fury, Marina eventually casts her reverence aside, sparking her own rebellion against la familia and leading to an epiphany about her parents’ spiraling lives towards doom and departure.

In Romeria, Simón drives her story forward on many different levels at once. Apart from the main narrative – filmed dynamically by French cinematographer Hélène Louvart, whose work is also present at Cannes in her lensing of Scarlett Johansson’s Eleanor the Great – Simón also uses video footage supposedly recorded by Marina, and also a voiceover reading her mother’s diary entries about her blissful life in Galicia. Those glowing recollections of good times are quickly thrown into question in the film’s fantastical centrepiece, as Simón ditches her trademark realism and delivers a delirious reconstruction of the troubled lives of Marina’s papa and mama amidst a drug-addled haze.

Despite its eye-catching imagery, the sequence overloads the film with information that should better be left to the viewer’s imagination – after all, Romeria is shaped somewhat as a prodigal granddaughter’s investigation of a family secret, and the truth is best left to be revealed through Simón’s delicate niceties and slow-burning revelations. Then again, this is perhaps the director’s attempt to confront her personal demons before finally moving on to new stories and pastures, with the press kit describing Romeria as the final part in her “family cycle”. In that sense, Garcia’s layered turn – a mix of reticence, persistence and pent-up angst – offers Simón the best way to channel all of Marina’s (or her own) anxieties and anguish to the screen.

Director, screenwriter: Carla Simón
Producer: Maria Zamora
Cast: Llúcia Garcia, Mitch, Tristán Ulloa, Sara Casasnovas
Director of photography: Hélène Louvart
Editor: Sergio Jiménez
Production designer: Mónica Bernuy
Music composer: Ernest Pipó
Sound designer: Eva Valino
Production company: Elastica Films
World sales: MK2 Films
Venue: Cannes Film Festival (Competition)
In Spanish, French
115 minutes

Perhaps it raises false expectations to call the unpredictable, multi-genre The Secret Agent (O agente secreto) a political thriller, unless forced at gunpoint to choose a moniker for a film that defies categorization. It seems closer to a dark-humored gangster story told at breakneck speed. No stranger to nail-biting action and adventure, Brazilian director Kleber Mendonça Filho (Bacarau) puts all his cinematic cards on the table in a graphicly unforgiving exposé of the horrors of lawless 1977 Brazil, where human life is of so little value that people who want a killing done bargain with hitmen over the price, and numerous murders and disappearances can be directly attributed to the police themselves.

Set in Recife, the state capital of Pernambuco in Brazil’s poor northeast, this fast-paced, imaginative tale unfolds during the country’s long military dictatorship, which began with a coup in 1964 by the Armed Forces with the support of the U.S. This is key to unraveling the ambiguous story and the characters, who have gotten on the wrong side of the authorities and are now protected with new identities and safe houses by a sort of pro-democracy underground railroad. One of these “refugees” running and hiding from death threats is Marcelo (Wagner Moura), who returns to his native Recife, despite clear and present danger, to pick up his young son, Fernando, from his grandparents.

Told against a cascading mosaic of vintage movies, political cinema and genre tropes, The Secret Agent is a close relation to the directors’s Bacarau, which won the Jury Prize in Cannes in 2019. (Actor Udo Kier, who was featured in Bacarau, reappears in a cameo role as a Jewish tailor who the police chief bullies into baring his horrific scars from a concentration camp.) As a cinephile and former film critic, Mendonça Filho is delightfully adept at filling a frame with eye-catching movie posters and a number of secret meetings take place in a 35mm projectionist’s booth, where the grandfather works. This background is enlivened by D.P. Evgenia Alexandrova’s images, all the more atmospheric for being shot with Panavision anamorphic lenses for period authenticity.

An opening title informs us, with a touch of black humor, that 1977 was “a period of great mischief.” Before Marcelo is even close to the city, he gets a foretaste of the lethal atmosphere in a lonely gas station where he stops to fill up his battered VW Beetle. A few yards away lies a dead man under a piece of cardboard. The attendant calmly complains he has a hard job keeping stray dogs off the corpse, and though he phoned the police several days ago, they haven’t gotten around to coming by yet to take a look. They have their hands full with carnival week, which entices violence, and more than 100 deaths are expected before it’s over. Just then a patrol car pulls in. Ignoring the dead body, the two cops shake down Marcelo for spare change and his cigarettes.

Meanwhile in Recife, a trio of shady characters covered in carnival confetti march threateningly into a research lab. The scariest hombre turns out to be Police Chief Euclides and the others his trusted guns. The fetid body of a shark lies on an operating table with a hairy human leg sticking out of its side. The leading researcher (who is studying the shark) widens the incision and yanks it out. Later, Euclides’ men will steal the leg (which they obviously know all about) and throw it into the river, weighting it to make sure it stays down this time. But newspaper stories about the hairy leg turn it into an object of mass hysteria, and many people swear they have seen it in parks late at night, kicking the gay couples who use it as a cruising spot, a clever way for the film to foreground queerness under the dictatorship. (There are other jokes about the people having sex in public, like two employees in the registry office caught behind the filing cabinets.)

Welcomed with food, money and false identity papers and hidden away in a comfortable apartment by the 77-year-old Dona Sebastiana (Tania Maria), Marcelo gradually discovers what he has in common with his neighbors: they are all wanted for political reasons. As a safe house, it is the opposite of secure, and he is easy to track down at work in the Identity Institute, where he has the run of the state’s ID documents and can search for some record of his mother. This is exactly what happens in the film’s final section, aptly called “Blood Transfusion”, after a powerful businessman he has crossed gets wind he is in town and hires a killer to take him out. The killer, in turn, subcontracts the job to a local hitman, who botches everything in an exciting foot chase strewn with dead bodies.

But it doesn’t end there. Marcelo’s fate is being investigated by a college student (Laura Lufesi) in the present day. She weirdly pops up from time to time, listening to audio tapes made of Marcelo and a mysterious woman called Elza. The present day returns in the long final sequence with its radical change-of-pace rhythm, and feels like something of a let-down. Filmed on colorless white sets, it brings the action to a screeching halt as it explains some of the connections between the various characters.

Music plays a powerful role in animating the sequences and the eclectic period choices by Tomaz Alves Souza and Mateus Alves are a joy.

Director, screenplay: Kleber Mendonça Filho
Producer: Emilie Lesclaux
Cast: Wagner Moura, Udo Kier, Maria Fernanda Candido, Gabriel Leone, Carlos Francisco, Alice Carvalho, Roberio Diogenes, Hermila Guedes, Igor De Araujo, Italo Martins, Laura Lufesi,  Roney Villela, Isabél Zuaa
Cinematography: Evgenia Alexandrova
Editing: Eduardo Serrano, Matheus Farias
Production design: Thales Junqueira
Music: Tomaz Alves Souza, Mateus Alves
Sound: Moabe Filho, Pedrinho Moreira
Production companies: Cinemascópio, MK Prods., Lemming Film, One Two Films
World Sales: MK2
Venue: Cannes Film Festival (Competition)
In Portuguese
158 minutes

The film’s exceptional all-female cast, which features Valeria Golino and Matilda De Angelis in memorable career performances, offer viewers a way to visualize Goliarda’s abstract contention that civil society limits personal freedom in subtle and dangerous ways. Both individual and collective freedom is under discussion here, as the writer contrasts her stint in prison to the claustrophobic limits she feels outside on the city streets. Conventional morality and female roles are continually challenged in a film without much action, but with a narrative tension that holds the attention for nearly two hours.

Co-writing with Martone is his regular scriptwriter Ippolita Di Majo, who worked on two of the director’s other biopics, The King of Laughter based on the life of comic theater legend Eduardo Scarpetta and the 19^th century poet Leopardi. Here the subject is almost contemporary, yet less familiar and more sprawlingly difficult to recount, considering that Goliarda Sapienza shaped Italian culture on many different levels. They included her involvement with movie-making in the 1950’s as an actress and as an influential on-set assistant for directors like Bertolucci, Pasolini and Visconti. Born in Sicily, the daughter of a trade union organizer who knew Gramsci and Lenin (her mother) and one of the drafters of the Constitution of Italy (her father), the future writer grew up in an anti-fascist, anti-clerical household where left-wing political activism was the norm.

Rather regrettably, none of this fascinating backstory finds its way into the film, though one can see what the screenwriters were up against. Instead, we are plunged into Sapienza’s life mid-stream when she is 55 and has lost much of her courage and impetus to write. It is one of the darkest periods of her life, and the story begins as she is released from prison after stealing a woman friend’s jewelry and hocking it – partly, she says, to fund the release of her first novel; and partly as a “provocation”, just to see what would happen.

Set during the hot Roman summer of 1980 and oozing a lazy, explorative atmosphere, the story is told through a series of encounters the writer has with women she has met in prison who like her are now out of jail, interlaced with casual flashbacks to prison life. In reality, her stay inside the Roman prison of Rebibbia was brief, but it seems much longer in the film, corresponding to the immense effect it had on her outlook. She saw life in prison was a microcosm of social inequality and injustice, an extreme form of reclusion that mirrored the more subtle restrictions on freedom “outside”.

Her most intimate friend – and presumably lover – in that period is Roberta, a law-breaking criminal who is also a political prisoner, and some 30 years her junior. Rising star Matilda De Angelis (Rose Island, Across the River and into the Trees) has a punchy modern beauty and a sassy, street-smart attitude to match. Though the age difference makes her feel at a disadvantage and jealous, Goliarda shows she is no slouch in keeping up with Roberta as she slugs down double shots of straight gin on a hot summer day. Golino, who gets embarrassingly plastered, becomes jealous when Roberta’s tacky boyfriend arrives, and we join in her disapproval.

In a long sequence in an after-hours perfume shop, which Barbara (played by the singer Elodie, pitch perfect), another ex-prisoner, has just opened, the writer feels excluded from Roberta and Barbara’s edgy banter and secludes herself in a fancy bathroom complete with a tempting shower. The two younger women find her sitting there naked, smoking a cigarette while she waits for her body to dry. They end up stripping off too, but the scene is shot with such modesty (why?) that it’s not clear what happens. It’s one place there was no need to put the brakes on Goliarda’s rule-flouting hedonism. (Other places include two bedroom scenes that seem uselessly ambiguous.)

Photographed by D.P. Paolo Carnera with a stylized naturalism, mid-August Rome in 1980 is revealed as a breathtaking city devoid of cars (since every Roman took the family vehicle on vacation the same week). An empty Piazza del Popolo and ritzy Parioli are truly iconic images, as are the stylized views of the Termini train station and its glass restaurant, courtesy of production designer Carmine Guarino’s keen eye for location.

Noteworthy aids to the actresses’ very physical acting are the costume choices by designer Loredana Buscemi: Goliarda in flowing silk dresses with patterns recalling the bohemian 20’s; Roberta in punky leather jackets easy to remove.

Director: Mario Martone
Screenwriters: Mario Martone, Ippolita Di Majo
Producers: Nicola Giuliano, Francesca Cima, Carlotta Calori, Viola Prestieri, Annamaria Morelli
Co-producers: Toufik Ayadi, Christophe Barral, Jean Labadie, Alice Labadie
Cast: Valeria Golino, Matilda De Angelis, Elodie, Corrado Fortuna, Antonio Gerardi, Carolina Rosi, Francesco Gherghi
Cinematography: Paolo Carnera
Production design: Carmine Guarino
Costume design: Loredana Buscemi
Editing: Jacopo Quadri
Music: Valerio Viglliar
Sound: Maricetta Lombardo
Production companies: Indigo Film in association with Rai Cinema, The Apartment, Fremantle
World sales: Goodfellas
Venue: Cannes Film Festival (Competition)
In Italian
115 minutes

Oscar Restrepo (Ubeimar Ríos), habitante de Medellín, Colombia ganó un premio de poesía y publicó dos libros a los 25 años; 20 años después vive como un creador incomprendido  o como dice su hermana ¨un desempleado¨.  No escribe,  es alcohólico, idolatra al poeta José Asunción Silva -que cometió suicidio a los 30 años-  y desprecia a Gabriel García Márquez – Premio Nobel de Literatura-. Vive con su madre anciana a costa de sus hermanos; disfruta sufriendo lo que él considera los desprecios de la sociedad. Vive para las reuniones de una escuela de poetas aunque en momentos siente que ellos tampoco lo comprenden; un día conoce a Yurlady   (Rebeca Andrade)  una talentosa adolescente que le da propósito a su vida.

Con este retrato sería muy fácil tener un protagonista despreciable o – en el mejor de los casos – digno de conmiseración.  Sin embargo en esta comedia colombiana hay suficiente humor negro para aligerar la situación,  ironía para hacer una crítica social sutil y  desparpajo para desafiar los estereotipos de un protagonista que pasa de poeta maldito a Pigmalión de barrio.

El  director y guionista Simón Mesa Soto tiene una impecable trayectoria en el Festival de Cannes, su primer cortometraje Leidi  (2014) fue premiado como el mejor en el festival, el segundo Madre  (2016) participó también en la competencia oficial; su primer largometraje Amparo (2021) fue premiado en la Semana de la Crítica. Un poeta es su segundo largometraje que se estrena en la sección An Certain Regard.

Mesa Soto tiene una mano segura para dirigir actores, incluso los no profesionales – Ubeimar Ríos es un profesor de literatura –  los conduce para que hagan un trabajo naturalista. Solo hay un joven actor que exagera, acaso influenciado por las telenovelas comunes a toda América Latina.  Todos mezclan el drama con una parte divertida, incluso un rapero que canta con entusiasmo pero con mucha seriedad “Mójame el jacuzzi”. Es refrescante la ironía cuando que se les ordena a los poetas de la película que escriban sobre el amor y para ser tomados en serio deben aludir a “su pobreza, la lucha de clases, grupos indígenas, la raza y el Amazonas”. Mismos temas que son privilegiados en los festivales internacionales cuando se presenta cine de América Latina.

Toda la película está filmada con cámara en mano que se mueve al ritmo de cada escena. El punto débil del director es alargar la narrativa hasta los 120 minutos para no dejar ningún cabo suelto; son particularmente pesadas las escenas de persecución y acción.  Esto entorpece pero no define la calidad de Un poeta.

Dirección y guion: Simón Mesa Soto.
Productores: Juan Sarmiento G., Manuel Ruiz Montealegre, Simón Mesa Soto.
Reparto: Ubeimar Rios,  Rebeca Andrade, Guillermo Cardona
Fotógrafo: Juan Sarmiento G.
Director de arte: Camila Agudelo.
Editor: Ricardo Saravia.
Sonido: Ted Krotkiewski y Eloisa Arcila.
Música original : Trio Ramberget y Matti Bye.
Compañías Productoras: Ocúltimo, Medio de Contención Producciones (Colombia), MaJa de Fiction, ZDF Daskleine Fernsehspiel/ ARTE (Germany), Memento Film, FilmiVäst (Sweden)
Duración: 120 min.
Ventas internacionales: Luxbox
Muestra: Cannes Film Festival 2025 (Un Certain Regard)

Nicknamed the “Angel of Death”, Mengele conducted grotesque experiments on prisoners at the Auschwitz II-Birkenau concentration camp, treating humans as laboratory rats, then casually sending them to be killed. After the war, he evaded capture and fled to South America, where he was sheltered by shadowy networks of Nazi sympathizers. But as his notoriety began to spread, he became a high-profile target for Mossad and CIA agents.

A former political prisoner, critic of Putin and vocal opponent of the war in Ukraine, Serebrennikov is one of few Russian directors to escape the widespread festival embargo on Russian films and film-makers. Now self-exiled in Europe, his two most recent features have been European co-productions. Adapted from the prize-winning 2017 “non-fiction novel” of the same name by French journalist Olivier Guez, The Disappearance of Josef Mengele is less formally inventive than Limonov, but still a gutsy and finely crafted piece of work, part history lesson and part cautionary message for a new era when far-right racist demagogues are on the rise again.

As a relentlessly dour character study of an arrogant, irascible, fiercely unrepentant Nazi, The Disappearance of Josef Mengele is obviously a long way removed from heart-warming entertainment. Its time-jumping narrative structure becomes a little ungainly at times, while some of the baldly explanatory dialogue lacks finesse. That said, August Diehl gives a muscular and multi-layered star performance as Mengele, requiring him to age over almost 40 years, even managing to make us feel a little sympathy for the devil. Shooting mostly in lustrous monochrome, Serebrennikov and his team also couch the film in gorgeous visuals, making impressive use of the director’s signature balletic single-shot long takes and elegantly choreographed set-pieces. It is a gruelling watch at times, inevitably, but consistently compelling and frequently beautiful.

With its nervy black-and-white aesthetic, The Disappearance of Joseph Mengele borrows heavily from the grammar of film noir. The elusive anti-hero lurks in the shadows, always on edge, frequently on the run, forever haunted by fears that he will be captured by his enemies and finally forced to face justice. Spoiler alert: he gets away with it. As anyone even even casually interested in Nazi war crimes will already know, the real Mengele was never caught, instead dying in Brazil in 1979 after decades living in exile under multiple fake names. Indeed, his body was only identified years after his death, using DNA samples. His post-war biography was then slowly pieced together from various diaries, letters and insider accounts.

We first see Mengele fleeing Buenos Aires in 1955, just as Argentina’s fascist-friendly Peron regime is collapsing. A lavishly filmed sequence revisits his brief, risky return to Germany in 1956, where he reconnects with his ultra-conservative family and home-town coterie of unreformed Nazi gargoyles. Another visually dazzling chapter, framed in fluid long shots, shows Mengele marrying his second wife Martha (Frederike Becht) in 1958 in a grand Uruguayan mansion brazenly festooned with swastika decorations. By 1960, he is alone again and hiding out on a remote cattle ranch in Brazil, growing increasingly paranoid while pursuing a combustible secret affair with the wife of the exiled Hungarian couple who run the farm, Gitta Stemmer (Annamaria Lang), despite frequently berating both of them for their racial inferiority.

Serving as a loose narrative thread throughout the film, and allowing viewers at least one vaguely sympathetic character, are recurring two-hander vignettes from a 1977 reunion between Mengele and his grown-up son Rolf (Max Brettschneider) in Brazil, the sickly father defending his blood-soaked track record to his unconvinced offspring. Between unhinged diatribes on “racial hygiene” and “social Darwinism”, Mengele complains he has been unfairly demonised among many other doctors who worked for the Nazi regime. “Remorse is a sickness invented by the weak.” he sneers. “Auschwitz was a very profitable enterprise, but nobody wants to hear that now…”

Though they occupy only a small segment of the film, Mengele’s Auschwitz crimes are the heart of the story. Midway through the post-war narrative, Serebrennikov changes gear with a vivid, striking flashback set in the infamous Nazi extermination camp. Jumping to saturated colour, and framed as a montage of home movie footage, this sequence shows the young doctor cheerfully picking out freshly arrived human specimens from transport trains, experimenting on severely disabled inmates, then casually murdering them and coolly stripping their bones of flesh. In a bravura piece of editing, this whole interlude is artfully framed within a mournful musical performance by an orchestra of dwarf prisoners, a surreal poetic flourish rooted in Mengele’s real-life medical interest in dwarves.

The Auschwitz chapter also depicts Mengele in his newly married prime, with a blossoming career, a bright future, and a carefree home life full of sunshine and sex. There are echoes here of Jonathan Glazer’s The Zone of Interest (2023), contrasting the unspeakable atrocities of the Holocaust with the banal domestic contentment of the Nazi officials committing them. But Serebrennikov does not avert his gaze, or ours, from the abyss. Instead he paints ghastly snapshots of Nazi mass murder in ironically bright colours to reflect Mengele’s own twisted memories of the camp as a happy, liberating, personal career peak. It is a bold stylistic decision, underscoring how this story is not just a noir-tinged chase thriller but also a chilling true-crime horror film about one of history’s most prolific serial killers.

Director, screenwriter: Kirill Serebrennikov
Cast: August Diehl, Max Brettschneider, David Ruland, Frederike Becht, Mirco Kreibich, Dana Herfurth, Karoly Hajdyk, Falk Rockstroh, Annamaria Lang, Thilo Werner
Cinematography: Vladislav Opelyants
Editing: Hansjörg Weissbrich
Production designer: Vladislav Ogay
Art director: Liubov Korolkova
Costume designer: Tatiana Dolmatovskaya
Music: Ilya Demutsky
Producers: Charles Gillbert, Ilya Stewart, Kirill Serebrennikov, Julio Chavezmontes, Felix Von Boehm, Yan Vizinberg Abigail Honor, Chris Copper, Mélanie Biessy
Production companies: Hype Studio, CG Cinéma, Lupa Films, Arte France Cinéma, Scala Films, Forma Pro Films
Venue: Cannes Film Festival (Cannes Première)
In German, Spanish, Portuguese, Hungarian
136 minutes

Oscar Restrepo (Ubeimar Ríos), a resident of Medellín, Colombia, won a poetry prize and published two books when he was 25 years old. Twenty years later, he lives as a misunderstood creator, or as his sister says, “unemployed.” He doesn’t write, is an alcoholic, idolizes the poet José Asunción Silva—who committed suicide at age 30—and despises Gabriel García Márquez, Nobel Prize laureate in Literature.

He lives with his elderly mother at the expense of his siblings; he really loves suffering what he considers the scorn of society. He lives for the meetings of a school of poets, although at times he feels that they don’t understand him either. Then one day, he meets Yurlady  (Rebeca Andrade), a talented teenager who gives his life a purpose.

With these characteristics, it would be very easy to have a despicable protagonist, or at best, one worthy of commiseration. Instead this Colombian comedy contains enough dark humor to lighten the situation, irony to offer subtle social criticism, and a sense of self-confidence to challenge the stereotypes of a protagonist who goes from cursed poet to Pygmalion in the ´hood.

Director and screenwriter Simón Mesa Soto has an impeccable track record at the Cannes Film Festival. His first short film, Leidi (2014), won the festival’s Best Short Film award, and his second, Madre (2016), also participated in the official competition. His first feature film, Amparo (2021), won a Critics’ Week award. Un poeta is his second feature film, premiering in the Un Certain Regard section.

Mesa Soto has a sure hand directing actors, even non-professionals — Ubeimar Ríos for example is a literature professor —guiding them to deliver naturalistic performances. Only one young man overacts, perhaps influenced by the soap operas popular throughout Latin America. Everyone blends drama with a humorous side, even a rapper who sings “Wet my Jacuzzi” in an enthusiastic but deadpan style.

The irony is refreshing when the poets in the film are ordered to write about love, but to be considered serious, they must simultaneously allude to “their poverty, the class struggle, indigenous groups, race, and the Amazon.” (These are the same themes privileged at international festivals when Latin American films turn up.)

The entire film is shot with a handheld camera that moves in sync with each scene. The director’s weakness is stretching the narrative to 120 minutes to avoid any loose ends; the chase and action scenes are particularly tedious. The stretched rhythm hampers, but doesn’t define, the quality of A Poet.

Direction, screenplay: Simón Mesa Soto.
Producers: Juan Sarmiento G., Manuel Ruiz Montealegre, Simón Mesa Soto.
Cast: Ubeimar Rios,  Rebeca Andrade Yurlady, Guillermo Cardona
Cinematography: Juan Sarmiento G.
Art direction: Camila Agudelo.
Editing: Ricardo Saravia.
Sound: Ted Krotkiewski and Eloisa Arcila.
Original music: Trio Ramberget and Matti Bye.
Production companies: Ocúltimo, Medio de Contención Producciones (Colombia), MaJa de Fiction, ZDF Daskleine Fernsehspiel/ ARTE (Germany), Memento Film, Film i Väst (Sweden)
Running time: 120 min.
World sales: Luxbox.
Venue: Cannes Film Festival 2025 (Un Certain Regard)