Renowned for his lusty, humane, non-judgmental depictions of sex workers, porn stars, drug dealers, and other underclass outsiders, American indie writer-director Sean Baker returns to some familiar themes in Anora, but adds a fresh twist or two. Selected for the main Cannes competition for the second time, the prize-winning director of Tangerine (2015), The Florida Project (2017) and Red Rocket (2021) here gives us another sympathetic blue-collar heroine scraping a living on the margins of the American Dream, only this time he puts her in direct collision with ultra-wealthy characters and lets the sparks fly. For once, Baker explains in his Cannes publicity, he wanted to “make a film about rich people”.

The resulting chemical reaction is fizzy and volatile, but not quite the explosive cocktail it might have been. An overlong runtime, underwritten characters and some uneasy tonal wobbles dampen the film’s punchy humour and propulsive energy. A story riven with clashing class, gender and cultural issues also sidelines political commentary in favour of cartoon violence and screwball comedy, which can be great fun but leaves scant lingering aftertaste. Anora is Baker’s largest-budget production yet, though still modest by mainstream measures, with a simple Cinderella plot that could translate into commercial breakthrough. It’s a blast while it lasts, but less of a gritty, splashy, provocative statement than some of the director’s previous works.

Mikey Madison (Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, Scream) gives great tough-as-nails diva as Anora, aka Ani, a 25-year-old lap-dancer and sometime escort living around the Brighton Beach area of Brooklyn. Due to vaguely explained Uzbek family roots on the fringes of the old Soviet Union, she can speak passable Russian, making her the obvious choice to entertain big-spending 21-year-old Russian playboy Vanya (Mark Eydelshteyn) when he drops into the club where she works. Vanya is soon smitten, hiring Ani for private sex sessions, overnight stays in his flashy riverside mansion, then a week-long party vacation in a palatial Las Vegas hotel.

A super-rich oligarch’s son with a Borat-level grasp of English, Vanya radiates puppyish charm and springy energy, but he is also a spoiled, impatient, bratty man-child with major daddy and mommy issues. Still, he is generous with his money and throws the most lavish parties. He is also eager to marry an American woman to avoid being summoned back to Moscow to work in the family businesses. Just weeks into their boozy, druggy whirlwind romance, he and Ani get married, almost on a whim.

Exchanging transactional sex work for long-term romance is perhaps not the most secure future plan. Only Ani herself, and possibly Baker, seems to believe this stoned car crash of a wedding could possibly end in a Happy Ever After. For the rest of us, glaring red flags have been obvious from the first booty-shaking table dance. Sure enough, when news reaches Vanya’s family that he has arranged a “green card marriage” to a “prostitute”, all hell breaks loose.

Vanya’s livid control-freak parents instantly arrange to fly to New York on their private jet. Meanwhile they contact their local fixer Toros (Baker cast regular Karren Karagulian on mighty form), an Armenian-American Orthodox priest who is so terrified of failing his fearsome bosses that he marches out of a christening midway through. Toros and his two sidekicks, boorish Garnick (Vache Tovmaysan) and sensitive Igor (Yura Borisov), barge into Vanya’s mansion to demand he annuls the marriage. Instead, the ungallant groom flees, leaving Ani forcibly detained by three men. She fights back tooth and nail in an extended struggle that lurches uneasily between slapstick comedy and brutalising assault.

With Vanya on the run, Toros strikes a deal with a grudging Ani to help track him down and resolve the family crisis. They spend the night loudly bulldozing through the restaurants, gaming arcades and lapdance clubs around Brighton Beach. This chaotic cat-and-mouse chase ends with a comically catastrophic courtroom showdown and a return trip back to Las Vegas, with Vanya’s fabulously awful fire-breathing glamazon mother (Darya Ekamasova) cracking the whip.

More of these Succession-style family conflicts, with their clashing egos and escalating hysteria, would have made for a richer film. They work as riveting high-farce peaks, but they arrive a little too late in an oddly paced two-hours-plus narrative that gallops along in some sections, then drags in others. A more lyrical final section, which seems designed to give Ani a tender moment of closure after her traumatic ordeal as a plaything of callous mega-rich assholes, lacks conviction or firm resolution.

As an aesthetic package, Anora looks slicker than some of Baker’s more rough-edged, low-tech films. Even so, he retains his signature love of lurid neon colours, graphic sex scenes, booming rap tracks and libidinous club anthems. Familiar ingredients, all framed this time by some surprisingly poetic vistas of Brighton Beach and Coney Island.

Director, screenwriter: Sean Baker
Cast: Mikey Madison, Yura Borisov, Mark Eydelshteyn, Karren Karagulian, Vache Tovmasyan, Ivy Wolk, Darya Ekamasova, Lindsay Normington
Cinematography: Drew Daniels
Editing: Sean Baker
Music: Matthew Hearon-Smith
Production company: CRE Films
Producers: Sean Baker, Alex Coco, Samantha Quan
International sales: Filmnation Entertainment (US)
Venue: Cannes film festival (Competition)
In English, Russian
139 minutes

The films, created amid crisis, run between three and six minutes long and span fiction, documentary, animation, and experimental styles. The 22 filmmakers sought to capture fragments of life, blending personal and shared experiences. The result is an anthology that documents resilience, creativity, and the will to endure, while it celebrates life in a part of the world that has been abandoned, where most of the population is traumatized and displaced, with no sign of an end to the war.

Though brief, the films carry depth, capturing slices of daily life in Gaza that feel both personal and universally relatable. From Ground Zero was screened privately on the sidelines of the Cannes Film Festival by Masharawi as an act of protest. The official world premiere took place at the Amman International Film Festival. It as also selected for Toronto, and is currently Palestine’s submission for the 2025 Oscars.

Karim Satoum’s Hell’s Heaven opens the anthology with a surreal and deeply unsettling image: a man wakes up inside a body bag and uses it as a blanket to stay warm. The film’s dark humor and stark realism immediately set the tone of the project, encapsulating the absurdity and horror of life under siege. Satoum’s approach — mixing a Kafkaesque vibe with a touch of irony — looks at survival in its most bizarre and tragic forms.

In Ahmed Hassouna’s Sorry Cinema, personal loss and the creative process collide. Hesitant to create a film after the death of his brother and amidst the constant threat to his family, Hassouna was encouraged by Masharawi to turn his grief into art. The result is a poignant reflection on the power of cinema, where Hassouna apologizes to the medium itself for almost abandoning it. His short film is a moving tribute to the perseverance of Gaza’s artists, who are forced to create in circumstances that are practically unbearable.

Neda’a Abu Hassanah’s Out of Frame follows an artist who returns to her studio destroyed by shelling. Only a few portraits and sketches were saved. The sketches were supposed to be part of a graduation project, before the university was also bombed. All paintings were destroyed at the university. One painting the film is able to show is about the Gaza Sea, depicting how it is preserved as the only horizon and source of openness that Gaza civilians have. Another piece is the sculpture of a pigeon covered with pearls, as a symbol of peace and serenity. But now, the artist sees only a “murderous peace”, in her words.

One of the anthology’s most striking qualities is its attention to the small details of survival. In Recycling, Rabab Khamis shows a mother stretching a single bucket of water to meet her family’s many needs. The act is so ordinary yet speaks volumes about the ingenuity required to navigate daily life under occupation. Khamis’s focus on this seemingly mundane ritual reminds viewers of the quiet resilience found in Gaza’s homes.

Not every film in the collection is somber. Hana Eliwa’s No captures a group of young Gazans singing songs of hope and defiance. This uplifting short contrasts sharply with the anthology’s darker pieces, offering a rare glimpse of collective joy. Eliwa’s film reminds us that even in the direst circumstances, moments of lightness and resistance persist.

Children take center stage in several films, offering some of the anthology’s most powerful imagery. In A School Day, young students navigate a bombed-out classroom, their laughter and play blending eerily with the devastation around them. In Flashback, a young girl turns to music and dance as an escape from the harsh reality around her. Both films emphasize children’s resilience while reflecting the deep scars war leaves on the most vulnerable.

Yet, From Ground Zero isn’t just a testament to endurance; it’s also a portrayal of the fractured, interrupted lives shaped by Gaza’s struggles. Etimmad Wishah’s Taxi Wanissa remains unfinished, a stark reminder of the constraints faced by artists working in a war zone. The incomplete film becomes a symbol of how war interrupts lives, dreams, and creative endeavors.

The production of this anthology is a story in itself. Many filmmakers were displaced, working from temporary shelters or mourning loved ones lost to airstrikes. With resources severely limited, they shot films on handheld devices and improvised soundproofing setups, such as recording audio inside closets lined with rugs. Despite these challenges, the resulting films are polished yet raw, their aesthetic a testament to the unyielding spirit of Gaza’s artists.

What gives From Ground Zero its strength is its refusal to portray its subjects as mere victims. Instead, the filmmakers reveal Gaza as a place full of people who laugh, cry, resist, and create. By highlighting personal stories, the anthology challenges stereotypes and provides a layered view of life under siege.

This is not a film for passive consumption. It asks the viewer to engage, confronting the human cost of the war in Gaza. Rashid Masharawi’s leadership and the contributions of the filmmakers ensure these voices are preserved, even when the world often looks away.

Submitting From Ground Zero as Palestine’s entry for Best International Feature at the upcoming Oscars is both daring and significant. It frames the film as more than art — it’s a statement. On a global stage like the Oscars, the film compels audiences to see Gaza not as a distant crisis, but as a lived experience. Masharawi and his collaborators have created a work that will resonate far beyond its time.

Directors: Aws Al-Banna, Ahmed Al-Danf, Basil Al-Maqousi, Mustafa Al-Nabih, Muhammad Alshareef, Ala Ayob, Bashar Al Balbisi, Alaa Damo, Awad Hana, Ahmad Hassunah, Mustafa Kallab, Satoum Kareem, Mahdi Karera, Rabab Khamees, Khamees Masharawi, Wissam Moussa, Tamer Najm, Neda’a Abu Hassanah, Damo Nidal, Mahmoud Reema, Etimad Weshah, Islam Al Zrieai
Producers:Rashid Masharawi, Laura Nikolov
Music: Naseer Shamma
Editing: Pauline Eon, Denis Le Paven
Venue: Cairo International Film Festival
115 Mins
In Arabic

The stranger is a teacher, Nader (Yaqoub Alfarhan), assigned by the government to teach kids reading and writing. He arrives in his modern car, very unlike the practical pickup trucks used by the villagers, and he is wearing sunglasses and pants instead of the national costume. One of the elders, Abu Salem (Abdullah Alsadhan), and the Indian shopkeeper Madhur (played by actor Saleemriaz) question him about his intentions. Basically, Nader is presented as everything the locals are not: educated, an art lover, and clearly open to other cultures.

At this point the story splits into two strands, as we are introduced to Norah (Maria Bahrawi). This teenage orphan, who was raised by her aunt after her parents’ death, longs for everything the city folks do. She buys illegally smuggled and sometimes censored magazines about celebrities and fashion, listens to pop music, and is eager to look as pretty as the photo shoots she sees. Even in the confined space she lives in and the strict society she was raised in, she is a rebel. She is engaged to a man in the village, an arranged marriage she is desperate to postpone until her brother finishes his education.

The paths of the two misfits must, of course, cross. One day the artistic teacher tries to motivate his class, which consists only of boys, by promising to draw the student with the highest marks. Norah’s young brother Nayaf (Abdulrahman Alwafi) is the winner, and when she sees his portrait, she makes contact with the teacher.

The most beautifully performed scenes in the film are when Nader agrees to draw Norah. The arrangement is for them to meet secretly in the presence of the Indian shopkeeper, and on the condition that Norah won’t remove her burqa but will show only her face. The scenes encapsulate the film’s great dilemma: how to settle between one’s own desires and the desires of the environment. The aesthetics of the scene, beautifully directed by Alzaidi, quietly bring to mind the decades in which Saudi artists and film enthusiasts (Alzaidi included) had to challenge societal norms to pursue what they wanted.

The acting is convincing throughout. As Norah, Bahrawi embodies the naive yet rebellious teenager determined to outsmart her conservative surroundings and remove her shackles, while Alfarhan, playing the teacher, gradually unveils himself to be a former artist who resists the conservatives in the village by drawing portraits. Kudos to Alzaidi for including a character based on a southeast Asian immigrant, a crucial part of Saudi Arabia’s demographic and culture, people who are often overlooked or portrayed only from a comic perspective in Saudi popular culture.

The film also airs conservative viewpoints, showing the locals’ paranoia and panicked fear that the mere fact of a man drawing a woman will lead to an immoral act, in the classic artist-model stereotype. Nader and Norah, whose relationship is based on mutual interest in freedom of expression, bring a real challenge to this notion, as each tries to achieve their goal.

The allegory in the film is strong, but Alzaidi is careful not to suggest a clichéd clash between the urban and the rural, as the laws that limit creativity and art refer to the city. Nader is in the vanguard as a young teacher who, in a community where most people are illiterate, becomes a beacon of hope and enlightenment to educate their children. He is also the one who knows how to draw portraits, has been to the movies, smokes Red Marlboros, and knows who Michael Jackson is, yet he also respects Bedouin and local customs. His passion for the arts, culture, and progressiveness is not because he comes from the city, but because he chooses to champion the freedom to be self-determined.

The film hits three birds with one stone: it should appeal to a Western audience eager to dissect the radical change Saudi Arabia has undergone, it stays true to the uniqueness of the Saudi context which Alzaidi is a part of, and it is a fine drama.

The idea that ten years ago the director could have been arrested for making the same film is shocking. Alzaidi comes from a society that has always loved art and culture, even when these things could only be enjoyed underground. Set in the 1990’s, the film celebrates the present moment and salutes the artists who previously lived under the concrete of social conservatism.

However, while successfully walking a fine line between appealing to international markets and presenting an honest picture of a long-gone society, the film’s narrative presents little that is new to a Saudi or an Arab audience. This is a challenge many filmmakers in the MENA region face when they screen their films internationally. Nevertheless, Alzaidi’s debut is a promising and refreshing start to a serious Saudi cinema that is invested in understanding the country’s past, and creating a wave of filmmakers who can freely navigate different genres to tailor their stories. As the film ends, we know little about the fate of the Nader and Norah, but the portrait is satisfyingly present, sending a message of hope.

Director, screenplay: Tawfik Alzaidi.
Cast: Yaqoub Alfarhan, Maria Bahrawi, Abdulrahman Alwafi, Abdullah Alsadhan, Aixa Kay, Abdulrahman Alwafi, Saleemriaz.
Cinematography: Shaun Harley
Editing: Mounir Soussi
Music: Omar Fadel
Sound: Shaun Froes
Production company: Black Sugar Pictures
World sales: Cercamon
Venue: Cannes Film Festival (Un Certain Regard)
In Arabic
94 minutes

Though very differently conceived, the two films have a lot in common, not just as portraits of major undervalued or forgotten artists, but as revealing reminders of history and the open sore of racial injustice. Ernest Cole approaches its subject as a rise-and-fall biography, from his youth in Pretoria where he witnessed and photographed historic moments of Apartheid’s cruelty and injustice, and chronicled the rebellion against racial laws passed by the white minority, to an interlude in Norway, followed by his devastating exile in New York, where he sold his camera, lost his negatives and stopped taking pictures.

What makes the film unique is the decision to structure it almost entirely around thousands of stunning photographs, many of them never before seen; they are given context and meaning in a rapid-fire montage by Peck’s regular editor Alexandra Strauss, heightened by Alexei Aigui’s music and a piercing jazz and blues selection. Offering the eye visual pleasure and the heart emotions ranging from anguish to bemusement, this is a historic doc of tragic beauty that sticks in the mind. It should be a welcome guest at festivals and in selected theaters (Magnolia Pictures holds North American rights, MK2 is handling international sales), with a long shelf life guaranteed.

The first-person voiceover is read by actor and musician LaKeith Stanfield (Judas and the Black Messiah) in a strong young voice that outlaws pity or commiseration for Cole’s artistic and existential decline, but which rather puts the tragedy of his life within a numbing social context of racism and poverty that almost amounts to a conspiracy to destroy his talent and self-esteem. He died at 49, tormented by restlessness, homesickness and despair, a vagrant in New York.

Cole’s early photos sweep us into the dusty, crowded world of 1960’s South Africa, where the self-taught photographer, with only a few years of high school behind him, began nervously snapping his shutter “at eye level, while walking”. What he captured in electrifying, clear images was a society ruled by whites and divided in two very unequal parts: park benches for whites only, Black townships heartlessly bulldozed into the ground, people forcibly moved to remote prison-like reservations in the desert. When House of Bondage came out, it caused a furor. It was immediately banned in South Africa, and Cole found himself in the same position.

He found political asylum and a grant to spend a year shooting pictures in America, but his initial elation soon changed to feelings of anger and worthlessness as he documented the homeless Black men lying listlessly on the streets of Manhattan and the poverty and racism of the American South, which so much reminded him of South Africa. In 1968, he wrote, “the world is still not free”. “I turned my camera on you and saw nothing.”

Ernest Cole’s astounding work is presented in collaboration with the Cole estate, which gave Peck’s team access to his archive, including some 60,000 negatives that were believed lost. The latter turned up in a Swedish bank vault under the most mysterious of circumstances, and Cole’s family, represented by the photographer’s articulate nephew Leslie Matlaisane, was never told what they were doing there or who put them in the vault.

In a dispute that raises some of the same questions, the Hasselblad Foundation in Gothenburg has recently agreed to hand over to the Cole Family Trust the 504 prints in its possession, which Peck cites in the film.

Director, screenplay: Raoul Peck
Voice of Cole: LaKeith Stanfield
Producers: Raoul Peck, Tamara Rosenberg, Olivier Pere, Rémi Grellety
Cinematography: Moses Tau, Wolfgang Held
Editing: Alexandra Strauss
Music: Alexei Aigui
Sound: Stéphane Thiebaut
Production companies: Velvet Film, Arte France Cinéma
World Sales: MK2 Films
Venue: Cannes Film Festival (Special Screenings)
In English
105 minutes

The story begins in Marseille, in 1815: Edmond Dantès (Pierre Niney), the young first mate of the merchant ship Pharaon, has just learned he is to take over as the new captain, which angers his former superior Danglars (Patrick Mille). Just as he’s about to marry his beloved Mercedes (Anaïs Demoustier), Edmond is arrested and charged with being a Napoleon loyalist, based on an anonymous accusation. He is innocent, but knows just about enough to persuade the prosecutor, Gérard de Villefort (Laurent Lafitte), to sentence him to lifetime imprisonment, without trial, on the island of Château d’If.

There, with the help of fellow prisoner Abbé Faria, Dantès becomes a learned man and pieces together the identities of the three men who wronged him and conspired to keep him locked away: Danglars, Villefort and Fernand de Morcerf (Bastien Bouillon), Mercedes’ cousin, who is now free to marry her himself. When Faria dies, Edmond poses as his corpse to escape from the island, and uses his late friend’s information to get his hands on vast amounts of wealth. Officially dead to the world, Dantès returns to the French mainland with a new identity, the Count of Monte Cristo, and sets out to get revenge.

Much like The Three Musketeers, this adaptation, which brings American blockbuster-like ambition to France (and borrows at least one plot element from Disney’s swashbuckling take on the novel, released in 2002), is faithful to the spirit, but not always the letter, of Dumas’ text. Character relationships, in particular, have been amended and streamlined for the sake of narrative flow, and book purists will probably raise their eyebrows at some deviations in the third act, which tries to be more in line with contemporary mainstream entertainment and to critically address Dantès’ own moral shortcomings (the debate between justice and revenge, paired with some choice visuals in mansions and caves, is reminiscent of Christopher Nolan’s Batman Begins).

Unlike the 2023 double bill, though, The Count of Monte Cristo does feel a bit baggy at times. Even taking into account the book’s massive size (close to 2,000 pages), the runtime makes itself felt especially in the middle stretch as Matthieu Delaporte and Alexandre de la Patellière, whose previous directorial efforts were much smaller in scale, get used to playing in a significantly larger sandbox. They receive the skillful aid of a crew that already worked on the other two films, ensuring some visual continuity (whether this will actually become a Dumas Cinematic Universe further down the line remains to be seen).

Whereas the role of D’Artagnan helped elevate François Civil’s profile, Dantès confirms Niney’s status as one of the more interesting and entertaining French actors working today, his penchant for impersonation and multiple onscreen identities coming in handy as the Count adopts various aliases to fulfill his schemes. He’s surrounded by a solid supporting cast (Anamaria Vartolomei, the breakout star of Audrey Diwan’s Happening, is mesmerizing as the Count’s protégée Haydée), although Patrick Mille and Bastien Bouillon, ostensibly the main villains, do suffer a bit from having to share the screen with the naturally scene-stealing Laurent Lafitte, who almost walks away with the movie whenever he appears and is more than deserving of the “and” credit he receives in the cast list.

Directors, screenplay: Matthieu Delaporte, Alexandre de la Patellière
Cast: Pierre Niney, Anaïs Demoustier, Bastien Bouillon, Patrick Mille, Vassili Schneider, Anamaria Vartolomei, Julien de Saint-Jean, Laurent Lafitte, Pierfrancesco Favino
Producers: Dimitri Rassam, Robin Welch, Laurent Hanon
Cinematography: Nicolas Bolduc
Production design: Stéphane Taillasson
Costume design: Thierry Delettre
Music: Jérôme Rebotier
Sound: David Rit
Production companies: Chapter 2, Pathé Films, M6 Films, Logical Pictures, Umedia
World sales: Pathé Films
Venue: Cannes Film Festival (Out of Competition)
In French
178 minutes

The main Cannes program was certainly full of strong feminist heroines, many of them fighting back against abusive men and patriarchal power in general. Sean Baker’s Palme d’Or winner Anora, about a kick-ass sex worker who marries a Russian oligarch’s wastrel son, is arguably the director’s most conventional crowd-pleaser to date, but it features an incandescent lead performance from its young star Mikey Madison. In a similar vein, Jacques Audiard’s gloriously ambitious Spanish-language musical melodrama Emilia Pérez, which won the Jury Prize and the Best Actress award for four cast members, features three feisty heroines taking a stand against femicidal Mexican gangsters. And Marcus Van Horn’s The Girl with the Needle is a gripping, based-on-reality crime thriller with a timely message about women having agency over their own bodies. Even the competition’s two experimental films from Jia Zhang-ke (Caught by the Tides) and Best Director-winner Miguel Gomes (Grand Tour) are structured around gutsy, determined, independent women. Can it be mere coincidence that the heroines of both films end up navigating the gorges of the Yangtze River in search of men they have lost but cannot let go of?

These are all male-directed takes on female stories, of course, but women directors were also unusually prominent in the official Cannes program this year. Payal Kapadia became the first Indian director to win the Grand Prix for her film All We Imagine as Light, a tender relationship drama that pivots on female solidarity in the midst of rapidly changing social mores, where defunct arranged marriages coexist with premarital sex and Muslim-Hindu love affairs.

Coralie Fargeat’s darkly satirical body-horror thriller The Substance, which won the Best Screenplay award, is a deranged all-out assault on sexist and ageist double standards in the entertainment industry. Meanwhile, Andrea Arnold’s lyrical coming-of-age drama Bird and Agathe Reidinger’s impressive debut feature Wild Diamond are both sympathetic portraits of working-class teenage girls from dysfunctional families navigating a society dominated by manipulative, violent men. A prominent voice in the French #MeToo movement, actor-director Noémie Merlant premiered her second feature The Balconettes, a lurid comedy thriller that turns a grisly case of rape and revenge into a panoramic critique of toxic masculinity.

Of course, Cannes is still Cannes, which means high-profile competition slots for legendary Old Masters from bygone cinematic eras, regardless of their fading powers. This year, alongside an honorary Palme d’Or for George Lucas, the program featured a cluster of self-indulgent, semi-autobiographical works by his 1970s and 1980s contemporaries. The 77-year-old Paul Schrader’s autumnal confessional Oh Canada and 81-year-old David Cronenberg’s atmospheric but half-baked The Shrouds both touched on personal themes of grief, loss and mortality. But the undisputed heavyweight disaster of the festival was 85-year-old Francis Ford Coppola’s long-gestating passion project Megalopolis, an operatic hymn to the Great Man Theory of history which disproves its own thesis with pompous, incoherent, self-regarding hubris.

Megalopolis has to top any count of the big losers passed over by Greta Gerwig’s main competition jury. Despite being critically demolished almost across the board, it should still do business with Coppola’s loyal and reverent following when it is released commercially. On the other side of the see-saw sits The Girl with the Needle, a period film whose impoverished setting and grim bleakness, along with a realistic and heart-rending story about abortion and infanticide, will do it no favors at the box office. It was the critical favorite going into the award ceremony.

Also ignored were two of the most overtly political films in competition, Ali Abbasi’s exploration of Donald Trump’s rise to power in The Apprentice and Kirill Serebrennikov’s biopic of a Russian right-wing extremist in Limonov – The Ballad. Both of these grotesque, over-the-top portraits bursting with exuberant period music had their merits and should be viable commercial releases. The one political film to get a small nod from the jury was the Iranian The Seed of the Sacred Fig, Mohammad Rasoulof’s daring exposé of the government’s violent crackdown on peaceful protesters supporting the Women Life Freedom movement. The director escaped an 8-year prison sentence and flogging by leaving Iran and going into exile just before his film’s triumphant bow at the festival.

Though the Directors’ Fortnight has long prided itself on being a non-competitive section, this year saw it finally inaugurate a prize of sorts voted by the audience. The first audience award was given to Universal Language, a crowd-pleasing yet contemplative piece in which a small Canadian town is reimagined as Persian-speaking, and how this entails another set of cultural clashes and reconciliation.

In the absence of the usual big hitters, the power in Asian cinema shifted to India, with competition entry All We Imagine as Light crowning first-feature director Payal Kapadia with a Grand Prix and Santosh receiving rave reviews. While Jia Zhang-ke returned home empty-handed, his peer Guan Hu, 55, made a late-career splash at UCR by winning the section’s top award with Black Dog.

From the troubled Middle East, emerging and veteran filmmakers won awards and a sweet part of the spotlight. Nearly all the films selected explored the themes of hope and resistance in diverse contexts. In addition to the Iranian political thriller The Seed of the Sacred Fig’s Special Prize in the main competition, Saudi newcomer Tawfik Alzaidi’s tribute to artists and art in closed-minded societies, Norah, received a Special Mention in Un Certain Regard. In the Critics Week, the Egyptian documentary The Brink of Dreams championed female emancipation and won the esteemed L’Oeil d’Or. Two other titles of note that won critics’ and audiences’ acclaim were Palestinian Mahdi Fleifel’s masterfully told ode to exiles, To A Land Unknown, in Directors’ Fortnight, and Somali director Mo Harawe’s film about hope and solidarity in a post-war country, The Village Next to Paradise, in Un Certain Regard, making Harawe the first Somali filmmaker to compete at Cannes.

Love poured forth across the official selection at Cannes, but the love for a mother in Boris Lokjine’s The Story of Souleymane may be this year’s most touching depiction of love. Lokjine’s hero is motivated to hustle and to become French because he understands his troubled mother needs him to take care of her. That need takes him from Guinea to Libya to Europe. For his moving performance in the film, first-time actor Abou Sangare, who broke down in tears following a screening at the Théâtre Debussy, deservedly received the Best Actor award in Un Certain Regard (the film also took home a Jury Prize and a Fipresci award.) Sangare was one of two black Africans honoured with awards in that section, the other being the UCR Best Director Prize to  Zambian director Rugano Nyoni for her semi-surreal drama On Becoming A Guinea Fowl. Black Africa doesn’t show up too much in Cannes, but four wins at one edition is not a bad return.

Cannes Classics, the strand showcasing restored films and documentaries about cinema, celebrated its 20th anniversary and opened in style with the highly anticipated world premiere of Napoléon, Abel Gance’s 1927 silent epic, now back in its original seven-hour glory. Cannes screened the first half of this opus. With its usual cunning blend of stone-cold classics and less seen (but no less interesting) works from the past, the section expanded throughout the Palais, mainly in the smaller Salle Buñuel but also in larger auditoriums like the Salle Debussy, which hosted the 40th anniversary screening of Paris, Texas with Wim Wenders in attendance.

After Venice, Cannes became the second of the big three European festivals to give immersive works and virtual reality their own dedicated section with the brand new Immersive Competition. An intriguing initiative, albeit one that is likely to remain more niche than Venice’s similar section. The reason: Venice’s Immersive Island is less than two minutes away from the Lido by boat, while Cannes’ Cinéum multiplex is a good half-hour bus ride from the Palais, making it a daunting prospect for attendees with tight schedules.

Drawn in the vaguely realistic style of old comic books and populated by a handful of stereotyped stock characters with names like “the Poor Woodcutter” and “the Poor Woodcutter’s Wife”, the film is based on a book by Jean-Claude Grumberg, who has worked on screenplays for such legends as Francois Truffaut and Costa-Gavras. His long experience writing plays for children and young people is keenly felt in The Most Precious of Cargoes and suggests the film might find its main audience in schools, where it would be a marvelous teaching tool.

Its premiere in competition at Cannes seemed a little much for such a simple, direct work that offers no new insights on the horrors of the German concentration camps, in the way, for example, that Jonathan Glazer’s 2023 Cannes Grand Prix winner Zone of Interest shocked audiences with its unexpectedly “normal” approach to the private life of Auschwitz commandant Rudolf Hoss. Cargoes does not even push the pedal to the floor on its Brothers Grimm fairy tale structure, which certainly promises a much richer subtext than we get. The result is a film hard to stay interested in, as Alexandre Desplat’s orchestral score sweeps through forest scenes of cold, hunger, poverty and misery one howling war-stricken winter.

A fire-breathing train blows its whistle and bursts through the heavily falling snow. Later, a flashback takes us inside one of the cattle cars packed with anxious human beings, among whom are a young couple with twin babies. In a moment of desperate lucidity, the father glimpses a peasant woman in the snow and throws one of his children out the window. The scene takes place wordlessly over music and sound effects, communicating only through the mother’s open-mouth scream and the fear and horror in the other passenger’s eyes.

When the train reaches the death camp, we see very little after the father and mother are separated. The last we see of the woman, she is still carrying her remaining child. The doomed despair on the father’s face is eloquent enough. The most graphic scene comes much later in the film: two emaciated prisoners toss skeleton bodies into a pile off screen; then a fearsome montage of skulls brings home both the number of dead and their suffering.

These terrible scenes, however, are few in number and secondary to the main story about how the Woodcutter’s Wife (voiced by a patient, stubborn Dominique Blanc), who longs for a child, finds the baby in the snow and raises it, at first against her husband’s wishes; then both fall in love with the happy, gurgling little girl. As events come to a head with the other woodcutters, the wife and baby find shelter with a fierce hermit who has lost half his face in “the other war”, always moving on to survive.

The film is bracketed with Jean-Louis Trintignant’s wise introduction and conclusion as the offscreen narrator, who pops up a few more times with his light touch, ironizing on what is truth: did none of this happen, as some people say? Or is what we see on the screen the truth? That warning to Holocaust deniers makes a strong statement in an ending that is both touching and sentimental.

Director: Michel Hazanavicius
Screenplay: Michel Hazanavicius, Jean-Claude Grumberg, based on Grumberg’s novel
Producers: Florence Gastaud, Robert Guédiguian, Michel Hazanavicius, Riad Sattouf, Patrick Sobelman
Voice cast: Jean-Louis Trintignant, Dominique Blanc, Grégory Gadebois, Denis Podalydes
Animation: Julien Grande
Editing: Laurent Pelé-Piovani
Music: Alexandre Desplat
Sound: Jean-Paul Hurier, Selim Azzazi
Production companies:
World Sales: Studio Canal
Venue: Cannes Film Festival (Competition)
In English
81 minutes

A Kuwait-born, London-based film-maker and multimedia artist of Indian heritage, Kandhari first began to conceived this offbeat yarn on a trip to Mumbai a decade ago. With just one previous feature to his name, his directing CV mostly consists of shorts and music videos. Which helps explain the splashy visuals and pop-heavy soundtrack of Sister Midnight, which boasts an overstuffed Tarantino-ish jukebox selection including Bob Dylan and The Band, heavy rockers Motorhead, country singer Mary Robbins and many more. The film’s title, borrowed from a vintage Iggy Pop song, also chimes with its heroine’s punky spirit.

A moon-faced, saucer-eyed, hilariously deadpan presence on screen, Apte stars as Uma, young woman nervously heading to Mumbai to begin an arranged marriage to a man she has barely even met, the well-meaning but shy, heavy-drinking Gopal (Ashok Pathak). Stuck in a single-room shack with a husband who is either literally or emotionally absent all day, her anger and frustration soon begin to boil over.

“Why can’t you just be a person, like the other people?” pleads Gopal, who is sympathetically presented here as more weak-willed, clueless sap than patriarchal bully. Indeed, Uma initially attempts to play the dutiful wife role, taking her cue from her amusingly cynical neighbour. But a dead-end life in a cramped domestic prison cell very soon drives the hot-tempered, potty-mouthed newlywed to despair, and she heads out into the big city seeking wider horizons.

Uma’s escape plan begins innocently enough, with a mundane after-hours cleaning job and a flamboyant gang of transgender friends, bonded by their shared outsider status. But events take a more macabre turn following a fraught family wedding. Sister Midnight then becomes a twist-heavy nocturama which includes the drinking of animal blood, an accidental death, the grisly business of disposing of a chopped-up corpse, a bizarre sojourn in a spiritual commune, and more. The zig-zagging plot becomes little ungainly here, but Kandhari is clearly not aiming for a conventional narrative arc, more a delirious crescendo of increasingly weird episodes.

Even at its most overheated, Sister Midnight is prevented from careering off the rails completely by dextrous editing, handsome visuals, strong performances and bruisingly dark humour. The long opening section, which plays entirely without dialogue, is a reassuring early sign that Kandhari has an imaginative and original eye. Crucially, Apte is magnetic as a downtrodden housewife with a feral beast lurking inside her, or perhaps the other way around. Fighting back against sexist limitations and stifling social conventions, she’s as mad and hell, and she’s not going to take it any more.

Director, screenwriter: Karan Kandhari
Cast: Radhika Apte, Ashok Pathak, Chhaya Kadam, Smita Tambe, Navya Sawant
World sales: Protagonist Pictures
Cinematography: Sverre Sørdal
Editing: Napoleon Stratogiannakis
Production design: Shruti Gupte
Music: Paul Banks
Producers: Alastair Clark, Anna Griffin, Alan McAlex
Production companies: Wellington Films (UK), Griffin Pictures (UK)
Venue: Cannes film festvial (Directors’ Fortnight)
In Hindi, English
110 mins

A two-parter which begins in a monsoon-soaked, magenta-hued Mumbai and ends amidst the crimson-and-green landscapes of a fishing village, All We Imagine As Light is as soothing on the eye as it is on the heart. Foregoing festival-friendly representations of this Indian metropolis as the embodiment of sleaze and chaos, the Mumbai-based director – who readily describes herself as someone from a “privileged class” in the press notes – has opted to depict her hometown more as a city of sadness than one of sensational violence.

Revolving around relationships shaped nearly entirely on generosity and kindness – and that includes those involving men – All We Imagine As Light offers what its title suggests, as Kapadia chooses to tackle issues such as arranged marriages and inter-ethnic tensions with subtlety rather than simplistic sloganeering. With its three leading actors delivering engaging turns as women from various backgrounds and temperaments, this first fiction feature, and India’s first competition entry at Cannes for three decades, is designed to endear all and offend none.

Kapadia establishes the film’s serene tone from the opening sequence in which women are shown eating, sleeping, laughing and listening to music in a “ladies’ compartment” on a train. A while later, nurses in a hospital talk excitedly about movies over lunch and gleefully discuss what films they are going to watch after work, their lust for life very palpable.

But two of them stand aloof from the camaraderie, and for different reasons. As one of the senior staff members in the ward, Prabha (Kani Kusruti) cuts a forbidding figure for the younger ones, as she prefers to do good – for her patients, and for colleagues in trouble – than being good fun. Her melancholy also stems from her angst about her husband, who has gone incommunicado since moving to Germany for work, an uncertainty that prevents her from contending with her feelings about a doctor-colleague’s attentions.

Prabha’s younger colleague and roommate Anu (Divya Prabha, Declaration), meanwhile, is a free-spending free spirit who only has time for her boyfriend Shiaz (Hridhu Haroon). While she is bold enough to dismiss her family’s repeated attempts to match her with a financially suitable and caste-compatible fiancé, she is ill at ease with the repercussions she might face for dating a Muslim man.

Completing the trio is the older Parvaty (Chhaya Kadam), a cook in the hospital cafeteria who is about to lose her home of two decades to property developers. The working-class counterpart to the two comparatively privileged nurses, whose encounters with the deprived masses are mostly limited to their brief interactions with patients at work, Parvaty slowly brings Prabha out of her shell and into personal and political emancipation.

Ranabir Das’s camerawork, along with the production design by Piyusha Chalke, Yashasvi Sabharwal and Shamim Khan, manages to strike a delicate balance in evoking Mumbai’s cramped cityscape without tipping it towards the ominous. But just as the actors’ small gestures are crucial to the narrative, small (or small-ish) objects are used effectively to take the place of suppressed traits and unspoken emotions. Take the two presents Prabha receives from the two men in her life, for example. While her husband (supposedly) sends her a big red rice cooker from Europe, her doctor-suitor gives her a beautifully-adorned book of poetry – a metaphor, perhaps, for Prabha’s need to choose between sense and sensibility.

An eviction, a resignation and a political-religious parade later, the film’s second half unfolds in a dramatically different palette by the sea. Unlike the nocturnal Mumbai and Kapadia’s visual and verbal depiction of strangers in a strange land, the coastal town of Ratnagiri always appears engulfed by the bright light of the day. Here, the women are finally able to explore their desires and doubts, the climax being an interwoven sequence switching between Prabha’s reconciliation with the spirit of her missing husband and the physical union that Mumbai’s cramped geography has denied Anu for so long.

While retaining some of the documentary touches of her previous work, Kapadia’s screenplay is rich in shrewd symbolism. But the most important allegory running through the film is the emphasis for solidarity across caste, class and gender lines. Just as A Night of Knowing Nothing paid tribute to the student protests against government interference at the Film and Television Institute of India in 2015, All We Imagine As Light is an elusive yet equally robust call for equality and social justice.

Director, screenwriter: Payal Kapadia
Cast: Kani Kusruti, Divya Prabha, Chhaya Kadam, Hridhu Haroon, Azees Nedumangad
Producers: Thomas Hakim, Julien Graff
Cinematography: Ranabir Das
Editor: Clément Pinteaux
Music: Dhritiman Das
Production design: Piyusha Chalke, Yashasvi Sabharwal, Shamim Khan
Sound design: Benjamin Silvestre, Romain Ozanne, Olivier Voisin
Production companies: Petit Chaos, Chalk and Cheese
World sales: Luxbox
Venue: Cannes Film Festival (Competition)
In Malayalam, Hindi
114 minutes

It’s a criminally good sequence—and Lellouche knows what grim beauty he has wrought. He allows the song to play on longer than you might expect, interjecting its intoxicating groove with an explosive blast of his own. The confidence at play is astounding and “remixing” a popular rap song is a mark of artistic indulgence that Lellouche pulls off too well. Maybe he is masturbating at length—his film is over 160 minutes—but he is also pleasuring to the viewer. Or maybe that’s a coincidence. Whatever the case, his film is a blast.

An epic tale of love, revenge, youth, rage, and class, Beating Hearts (original French title L’Amour Ouf) is an extraordinarily lively work of cinema. Based on a Neville Thompson novel, the tale spans years, following Clotaire and Jacqueline, a combative ne’er-do-well boy and the high school girl he falls in love with after she responds to his jibes with insults of her own. It’s the typical meet cute of kids: the one where cruelty supposedly masks affection.

On that maiden meeting, Clotaire learns Jackie, as he calls her, likes The Cure and steals a vinyl for her, but she brusquely says she already has it. It’s dismissive, but she has already shown that she likes this suitor and music will remain important to this pair of lovers, ‘Nothing Compares 2 U’ playing a recurring role in their romance over decades. This use of pop music is one reason Beating Hearts will appeal to a vast number of viewers. Another reason is the genre elements deployed cleverly and energetically—to say nothing of the fact that Jackie grows up to become Adele Exarchopoulos, a draw for European viewers wherever they may be found.

Speaking of the French woman, her sexuality was front and centre in 2013’s Blue Is The Warmest Colour. A decade on, that appeal abides, but she wears it subtly and wields it lightly. In one scene here, in the second half, the camera films her from behind as she walks with another character. She is wearing shorts and doing nothing of note but even that nothing is charged enough for the few seconds the camera lingers. But just before she appears onscreen as the older version of Jackie, her lover Clotaire goes to jail, while she loses her way. The story forgets him briefly and Jackie becomes the solo lead.

When he reappears, he does so as a cooly menacing François Civil. And it is never in doubt that the lovers will find their way to meet again. There is no suspension of disbelief required: it’s easy to believe that the old flame still burns for Clotaire because, well, the older Jackie is played by Exarchopoulos.

In life and on screen, this is believable. The problem is that a reunion is inconvenient. But you get it. For those who have been there, a certain kind of love can prove inescapable.

This love story might be enough. But not for Lellouche. He seems intent on becoming an auteur. His ideas of lighting up a scene are interesting and seem to borrow a little from Gaspar Noé. While noirish and gritty, some of his night scenes are drenched in neon-red, a good-looking gimmick that often foreshadows violence in a film brimming with it. For an actor-turned-director who has only made one solo feature before this one, his command of cinema as a visual art form is beyond competent. Here and there, you find pleasing flourishes. There are dance sequences that are the visual expression of the lovers’ mutual infatuation; there is a piece of chewing gum which throbs tellingly like a heart. There are color codes seeming to telegraph an ambiguity that is tied to the film’s interpretation. The camera pans are super-charged. We get the striking animation of an eclipse—twice!

Lellouche’s writing is just as good, even if the story does have a few loose ends. The screenplay, which he has co-written with Ahmed Hamidi and Audrey Diwan, is dotted with so many quotables—as though his aim from the start was to produce a script closely resembling an old school rap song, the type chockablock with punchlines. Deploying Nas, now one of the hiphop’s masters of a semi-ancient epoch, is no coincidence.

And yet, for all the violent masculinity at play, Lellouche is a sentimental man. At one point, his story seems destined to take a Tarantino path of cartoonish violence and/or the Park Chan-wook bus of the futile vengeance. Instead, he constructs a third route. Even if his film’s first and last scenes are framed to allow a viewer’s interpretation, it is a trick anyone paying attention can see through. We know the interpretation the director and his co-writers prefer because only a certain kind of man would synchronise lovemaking with a lunar eclipse. These people are in love with love.

Using Clotaire and Jackie, they want to make a case for why viewers should be just as enthralled with love and romance—despite all of life’s violence and injustice. They succeed and do so exceedingly well.

Director: Gilles Lellouche
Screenplay: Gilles Lellouche, Audrey Diwan, Ahmed Hamidi
Cast: Adèle Exarchopoulos, François Civil, Mallory Wanecque, Malik Frikah, Alain Chabat, Benoît Poelvoorde
Producers: Alain Attal, Hugo Sélignac
Cinematography: Laurent Tangy
Editing: Simon Jacquet
Production companies: Tresor Films, Chi-Fou-Mi Productions
Venue: Cannes Film Festival (Competition)
In French
166 minutes

The Film Verdict: Your first two shorts Life on the Horn (2020) and Will My Parents Come to See Me (2022) addressed local issues in Somalia. What motivated you to stay on the same subject in your first long feature?

Mo Harawe: I wanted to write something that is my explanation of what is going on in this complex country. And I was not thinking about what you only see, but also to capture the feeling. You have to know what people are feeling so you can actually know them.

TFV: Your film not only made history as the first Somali film to be screened in the Cannes Film Festival, but your filmography has in many ways created a visual narrative of Somalia.

MH: My goal was not to create just images. I was thinking about the characters and the stories. But I was conscious of really showing the other side of the coin, the side that you don’t know of the country. I think it is the responsibility of the person who is taking that frame to choose which side to tell and not to tell, and if you want, to tell both. For me, I am trying to tell both sides. We have problems here, but it is not only us who are creating these problems. There are external factors causing problems. That is where the name of the film comes in. This country has the potential to become a paradise with less than 15 million people living in this big area, with the Gulf of Aden to the north and the Indian Ocean to the east. If we just have a solution for these problems, then we can be a paradise.

TFV: In many cases, the international market is setting its eyes on certain narratives coming from Africa. How did you manage to pitch and fund your idea?

MH: From the beginning, after I wrote the script, and had a plan to shoot it. I knew that if I’m shooting this script it has to be in Somalia and I need to shoot for at least three months. These were my rules, because I was pleased with the script. Luckily, my producers read it and said yes, so I did not have to convince anyone. Luckily it worked out.

TFV: Your actors seemed very comfortable and confident on screen. Were they professional or amateur actors?

MH: They are professionals in the sense that they did an amazing job, but they did not go to an acting school. They have been in front of the camera for the first time. We were lucky to find them and we found them in a very unconventional way, through friends and connections and situations.

TFV: In the background of your character’s different struggles, there is the mention of piracy, terrorist attacks, illegal fishing, and pollution, which are issues Somalia is still facing. What was your experience filming on the Somalian coast?

MH: Shooting a film is always challenging. And in Somalia, there were practical difficulties. The team was small, and you needed time for everything. Other than that, I think it was only possible to make this film in Somalia. It would never have been possible elsewhere. The freedom and flexibility we had as a crew was amazing. Sometimes we would go to someone’s place and say “we need your place”, and they would give it to us to shoot in.

TFV: The film was highly praised for its cinematography, showing very visually striking images from daily life. How was that process?

MH: I was glad to have worked with DOP Mostafa Al-Kashif. He is a very talented guy — not only that, but a very sensitive and very human guy. I wanted to work together on the last film, Will My Parents Come to See Me (2022), but unfortunately he was not allowed to enter in the airport. So we wanted to make this happen in the new film and Mostafa came in with his Egyptian crew, and did an excellent job. I don’t think it would have been possible without his effort.

More post-modern fairy tale than realistic drama, Universal Language feels no obligation to fill in any explanatory back story for its surreal remix of Canadian melting-pot history. Shortly before the film’s Cannes launch in the Directors’ Fortnight sidebar, distribution deals were announced for North America. Other territories are yet to confirm, but Rankin’s highly engaging blend of pastiche, homage and deadpan comedy should have strong appeal to festivals and discerning art-house audiences.

As a young man, Rankin made a pilgrimage to Iran with ambitious plans to study film-making under directors like Mohsen Makhmalbaf and Abbas Kiarostami. The plan did not work out, but his love for these cinematic masters clearly stayed with him, and shapes the narrative of Universal Language with its fable-like episodes, poetic language, understated emotion and sardonic humour. There are other cinematic echoes in here, notably the heavily stylised absurdism of Rankin’s fellow Winnipeg indie film-maker Guy Maddin. In visual terms. cinematographer Isabella Stachtchenko frames the city’s brutalist concrete plazas, bland apartmet blocks and snowy parking lots with deliciously deadpan precision, creating an artfully minimal aesthetic that falls somewhere between Wes Anderson and Roy Andersson.

Crucially, however, Universal Language is much more than a cinematic love letter, and can be enjoyed on its own terms as a wry comic parable. Rankin patiently waves together multiple plots and characters, opening with pre-teen school students Negin (Rojina Esmaeili) and Nazgol (Saba Vahedyousefi), who discover a large banknote frozen in a block of ice. Meanwhile, eccentric tour guide Massoud (co-writer Pirouz Nemati) makes much-needed extra cash leading tourists around the key sights of Winnipeg, most of them bizarre fictions, and depressed Québecois civil servant Matthew (Rankin himself) quits his futile bureaucratic job and returns home to reconnect with his elderly, estranged mother. These three stories eventually converge and resolve in a lyrical, magical realist finale.

Universal Language is more tonally restrained and less self-consciously theatrical than Rankin’s debut feature, spoofy historical pageant The Twentieth Century (2019). That said, the two films share some stylistic tropes, including cross-gender casting choices and occasional lapses into mannered whimsy. A few of the jokes may also be too culturally specific for general viewers: satirical jabs at Québecois nationalist politics, for example, or a scene in which a long-abandoned suitcase is revealed as a UNESCO world heritage site, possibly a comment on Canada’s comically banal national myth-making.

That said, the film’s ironic undercurrents and subtle visual textures mostly work extremely well. Rankin and his design team made an inspired decision to apply a light patina of downtown Tehran to their Winnipeg locations, with school and shop signs in Arabic script, including a branch of the iconic Canadian coffee chain Tim Horton’s. In one office-set scene, the camera jump-cuts repeatedly between two opposite viewpoints but keeps the same wall-mounted photo centrally placed in every frame, a small but superbly choreographed sight gag.

Not just a pure exercise in style, Universal Language also feels like a personal passion project. There are skewed tributes to both the director’s deceased parents here, while the scene in which his semi-fictional alter ego revisits his former childhood home has a warm, tender, Proustian quality. In a further playful twist, the fake “original” Farsi title of Universal Language is Avaz Boughalamoune, which loosely translates as “Love Song for a Turkey”, a note-perfect pastiche name for the kind of vintage Iranian cinema classic that Rankin is invoking in this goofy but heartfelt midwinter night’s dream of a movie.

Director: Matthew Rankin
Cast: Regina Esmaeili, Saba Vahedyousefi, Sobhan Javadi, Pirouz Nemati, Matthew Rankin, Bahram Nabatian
Screenplay: Matthew Rankin, Pirouz Nemati, Ila Firouzabadi
Cinematography: Isabella Stachtchenko
Production design: Louisa Schabas
Editing: Xi Feng
Music: Amir Amiri, Christophe Lamarche-Ledoux
Producers: Sylvain Corbeil
Production company: Metafilms (Canada)
World sales: Best Friends Forever
Venue: Cannes film festival (Directors’ Fortnight)
In Farsi, French
89 minutes

While the film is filled with shimmering images aplenty – including a literally sparkling trompe d’oeil – the director falls short of using the texture of his 16mm film stock to its full potential. The same could be said of his characters, who could do with more thoughtful fleshing out, while their slow-burning relationships generate more a sense of lethargy than melancholy.

It’s inevitable that comparisons will soon be drawn between Viet and Nam and Inside the Yellow Cocoon, the Vietnamese feature which won the Best First Feature award at Cannes before embarking on its very successful festival tour. Like Pham Thien An’s three-hour film, Quy’s third feature is slow-moving, contemplative and relies heavily on personal stories to explore Vietnam’s contemporary historical narrative. Quy also brings to the screen something which has been largely overlooked: the plight of war widows and orphans seeking closure through the search for the remains of their lost loved ones.

This is perhaps Viet and Nam’s strongest suit, with its engaging depiction of a northern Vietnamese family’s trip south to a battlefield near the Vietnamese-Cambodian borderlands, and the things they see and experience there. Interestingly, the beating heart of this journey is not the film’s two leading characters, but the mother of one of them. Nguyen Thi Nga delivers a touching performance as Hoa, a middle-aged coal seller who last saw her husband off to war in the 1970’s. She is determined to find the place where he died with the help of another veteran (Le Viet Tung).

Echoing that long-ago goodbye between husband and wife is the impending separation between Hoa’s son Nam (Pham Thanh Hai) and his fellow miner Viet (Dao Duy Bao Dinh). Having had enough back-breaking toil, Nam has decided to find a better future abroad. By plunging him into both the claustrophobic environment of those decades-old underground coalfaces and then the literally suffocating conditions he goes through as an illegal immigrant, Quy laments how the nature of his people’s struggle for survival has remained very much the same. Truong Trung Do’s production design bolsters Quy’s screenplay in bringing such sentiments into the open.

Quy’s decision to use celluloid has paid off in the film’s first part. The grainy imagery evokes the monotonous, murky ambience of the depressed character’s miserable hometown to maximum effect. The 16mm stock also adds a documentary-like quality to the sequences there, with Quy and his editor Felix Rehm even retaining (or adding) the odd blots and scratches to individual frames. Once the film moves to the sun-scorched south, however, the grittiness evaporates, as the film plummets towards melodrama in a scene centering around a psychic’s histrionic performance in a religious ritual.

Viet and Nam’s weakest link lies with, well, Viet and Nam. Their first scene in the film provides the viewer with a substantial introduction to the pair, as they are shown whispering small stories into each other’s ears in the dark. And then a bell rings, and Quy reveals they are actually taking a break in the corner of a mine. They switch on their headlights, revert to their stoic selves, walk over to join the other labourers in their work. Later, a walk on the seashore, where the similarly dressed pair walk and talk, repeats the frisson of the opening scene.

But then their bond seems to be put on hold, with the actors Hai and Dinh left with nothing much to play with but expressions bordering on perennial ennui. It’s as if Viet and Nam, with their internalised traumas, have become merely ciphers for Vietnam. It’s perhaps a good thing in terms of what Quy’s trying to say, but not exactly the best way to keep audience engaged with their stories as flesh-and-blood individuals. 

Director, screenwriter: Truong Minh Quy
Cast: Pham Thanh Hai, Dao Duy Bao Dinh, Nguyen Thi Nga, Le Viet Tung
Producers: Bianca Balbuena, Bradley Liew
Executive producers: Alex C. Lo, Glen Goei, Teh Su Ching, Chi K Tran, Anthony de Guzman
Director of photography: Son Soan
Editor: Felix Rehm
Production designer: Truong Trung Dao
Sound designer: Vincent Villa
Production company: Epicmedia Productions Inc.
World sales: Pyramide International
Venue: Cannes Film Festival (Un Certain Regard)
In Vietnamese
129 minutes

The Film Verdict: Can you tell me about the genesis of To A Land Unknown? How did it all begin?

Mahdi Fleifel: I have been following young Palestinian men trying to leave the refugee camps in Lebanon and Syria and reach Greece to seek a future in Europe for the last 14 years, and about which I have made several documentaries. The journey started in 2010 when I made the documentary A World Not Ours (2012) after I finished film school. In it, I followed my lead character Abu Eyyad who was based in Ayn al-Hilweh camp [the largest Palestinian refugee camp in Lebanon] where my parents were born.

After the documentary, Abu Eyyad left for Greece. I went there and followed him, and a whole new world opened up for me. And I was fascinated by this. I was inspired by the novella Men In the Sun by Palestinian writer Ghasan Kanafani, which had a big impact on me growing up. And I felt this is exactly like what he portrayed when he wrote this novel in the 1960s, talking about Palestinians leaving their camp to seek a better life in the Gulf in Kuwait. And there they were stranded in the desert between Iraq and Kuwait. And I thought well, Athens is like the new desert, it’s an urban desert. For many years, I called the film Men in the Sun, as an inspiration and a working title.

TFV: After A World Not Ours, you made seven shorts about Palestinians in refugee camps and in exile in Europe. Was To A Land Unknown always the goal?

MF: I have made a successful documentary, so already I put myself in the category of documentary filmmaker, but I always thought of myself as a storyteller. I studied fiction in film school. The only reason I picked up documentary was because I was frustrated with the financing and all that. I wanted to go like a musician, go unplugged, you know, like pick up a camera and see where you can go.

That is how I ended up making documentaries, but my eyes were always on making fiction, using my imagination, telling stories that I kind of put together and based on my experiences but really trying to give something to the world, giving them the experience of exile.

TFV: What was the casting process like? Have you worked with actors who have the same experience of living in the camps in Lebanon and then arriving in Athens and wanting to go elsewhere?

MF: Not exactly. I really wanted to work with non-actors who had the refugee experience, but after some time it was proven technically and financially difficult, because Palestinians are scattered all over the world. So the two main characters, Mahmood Bakri and Aram Sabbah, are both Palestinian. One is a 48-Palestinian [Arab Palestinians living in Israel] and the other is from Ramallah. Aram has never acted before. I cast him three days before shooting. It was supposed to be another actor from Jordon. He was not allowed to get a visa. In desperation, we were brainstorming, and the sound recording team tells me “there is this guy Aram”. I had been lucky enough to meet Aram two years prior. He is a well-known skateboarder and a young film editor. I knew him and really liked his work, and I did a zoom call and auditioned him with Mahmoud who was already with us in Athens. It was a leap of faith that we basically jumped into and he proved to be brilliant. It took him a couple of days to find his rhythm with the crew and other cast members. I think he was a gift from above, just like many other things, happy accidents and coincidences that eventually helped us. 

TFV: Were there any other accidents that turned into ‘gifts from above’ during the filming process?

MF: Yes, for example the boy [Mohammad Alsurafa], I wanted to get a child actor from Jordan and he also was not allowed a visa because he was a real refugee, and the authorities were worried that he might stay in Greece and seek asylum. So again we found a boy who was in Gaza. In my script, the character was a Palestinian kid from the camp in Lebanon. When I found out that this boy was actually from Gaza, the war had already kicked off, and I thought it makes perfect sense to actually stay true to who the kid is. So he was able to bring his own experience to it, and I think there were miracles made on the production side.  

TFV: Are you concerned about even more lack of funding for Palestinian films and filmmakers, and films in general that are sympathetic to Palestinian voices, considering the crackdown on Palestinian voices in Europe and the U.S.?

MF: It was always difficult to get European money to tell our stories because that comes with a lot of ties. Europe has its own prism of what kind of stories they want to highlight. Making a film in exile about being exiled by exiles is almost impossible to finance. It was a lot of beg, borrow and steal private equity money. We really had to ask people for favours. I am Danish but I did not get any Danish funding. My producer is British, and he did not get any British money. So we made this film against all odds really. Any Palestinian film that gets made is a miracle, but it was really a miracle that we managed to do this one. It took me a little over eleven years, during which I built a body of work of seven shorts, but this film was always the carrot in front of the mule’s nose. 

Melvil Poupaud, Benjamin Biolay, and Fabrice Luchini also show up as versions of themselves. You get the sense that the film was made possible by someone famous just reaching for his contact list to assemble this list of European Celebrity Avengers. In what seems like a wink to the audience, one character drops the recently viral word “nepo baby” in a heated conversation. Chiara does have two super-famous parents and has become a famous actress, too. Her nepo baby credentials are solid.

In any case, besides being a collection of European stars, what exactly is this film about and why has it premiered in competition in Cannes? The latter question is a headscratcher; the film is too light to be a serious consideration for the Palme D’Or. As for the first question, truth is, there isn’t much of a story. But here it is anyway.

Near the start of the film, our heroine sees her father in the mirror and collapses. The next time we see her she is shielding her face from her mother, presumably because it is no longer hers. Deneuve assures her daughter that this isn’t the case. But shortly afterwards, Chiara decides to be exactly like her famous father. Most people in her circle are perplexed but accepting—except for Melvil, who embarrasses her publicly by snatching a wig off the imposter’s head. That changes nothing, though. Subsequently, Chiara starts to navigate her life as an incarnation of her father. It is a surreal transition, but Honoré keeps things flexible enough and doesn’t fully lean into the surrealism of this setup. There is no logical explanation either. He is operating on the level of absurdism.

It’s an interesting but thin premise. In fact, without the posthumous draw of Marstroianni and the extant wattage of the cast, Marcello Mio might not exist as a film at all. There is supposed to be some sort of commentary on the lives of children born to famous people, but a lot of that is so subtle that it barely registers. Or maybe it’s just buried under the film’s genuine lack of seriousness. Which is fine, given that it is billed as a comedy–but there are only a handful of laughs from the actions performed and the words spoken onscreen. At best, Marcello Mio is a lighthearted drama.

The most undeniably valuable feature of the film is its performances alongside a solid collection of songs. Deneuve as herself is a joy to watch, as is Luchini, whose character is the most accepting of the daughter-father transformation. Poupaud has the most dramatically demanding role outside of Chiara’s—but everybody here is really just having fun. The chemistry between the main players is familial and it certainly extends to the man behind the camera. You get a sense of the amount of fun and freedom Honoré is luxuriating in when his screenplay addresses the sexual misadventures of Mastroianni through dialogue involving his real-life daughter. A different kind of film might have chosen to be unkind—this, after all, is fiction so, technically, anything goes—but it is unlikely that such a film would attract the same stars Honoré has brought together.

So, for viewers who like the idea of European movie stars having fun onscreen in a film that honours one of the continent’s most famous actors, Marcello Mio will be a pleasant distraction, especially when it turns up on TV in the future. If that’s not you, then be warned: Your mileage may vary.

Director, screenplay: Christophe Honoré
Producers: Philippe Marti, David Thion, Angelo Barbagallo, Andrea Occhipinti and Stefano Massenzi
Cinematography: Rémy Chevrin
Editing: Chantal Hymans
Sound: Guillaume Le Braz
Production companies: Les Films Pelléas, Bibi Film, Lucky Red, France 2 Cinéma, Super 8
production LDRP II, TSF
World Sales: MK2 Films
Venue: Cannes Film Festival (Competition)
In Italian
121 minutes

The Somali-Austrian filmmaker Mo Haware breaks away from the familiar narratives around African films like gold mining, civil war, wild animals, violence and trauma. He uses these internationally-recognised tropes only to introduce a context, and no more. The film starts with a news clip from British TV announcing a drone strike against a leading figure of the Al-Shabab militant group, an offshoot of Al-Qaeda. But slowly, we are taken to an underdeveloped and marginalized village named Paradise, where the bright blue water and beautiful beach are perfectly accessible, but the residents are too busy making ends meet to enjoy them. Everyday is a struggle and a privilege.

The drone sequence is brilliantly used by Harawe to introduce Mamargade (Ahmed Ali Farah), a single father who works odd jobs like digging graves or driving shipments across the Somali coast for shady business owners. He receives a group of mourners carrying the body of a man killed in a drone strike. Mamargade has already dug the grave. After the Islamic funeral prayer and the burial, he is angry to receive only half his money.

When he returns home, he is met by his young son Cigaal (Ahmed Mohamud Saleban), later discovered to be a crucial protagonist in the story, who tells his father he had to do “drone training” in school. This entailed getting on the floor and putting his hands on his head, which the boy repeats in a scene shot with dark humor and not too much commentary about the miserable reality locals, children included, have to endure. Haware also allows Cigaal to have normal kid problems, like the strange dreams he is eager to share with his father and his schoolmates.

Father and son share the house with Mamargade’s sister Araweelo (Anab Ahmed Ibrahim) who is first introduced as she is finishing her divorce. Both brother and sister aspire to having enough to make a stable life and better future for Cigaal, despite the almost non-existent schooling available. While Mamargade prefers hustle jobs on the side and indulging in some khat, Araweelo wants to have enough money to open a tailor shop.

Hawara concentrates on the uniqueness of the Somali context, without dumbing it down or orientalising it for a wider audience. Whether it is the language, food, police uniforms or eating khat, the film champions the mundane and tries to find beauty in the normal. Nevertheless, Somalia has suffered from years of conflict and foreign intervention. In the background of many of the characters’ misfortunes are militant attacks, illegal fishing, pollution, piracy, and radicalism.

At times the film depicts pessimism and trauma, all captured beautifully by the tender camerawork of Mostafa El Kashef. For example, a mourning woman who is standing at the grave of her young daughter (just dug by Mamargade) asks why people have children in this world. Both Mamargade and Araweelo have gone through several personal defeats and failed romances. He mentions in passing that he had to pick up and bury the mutilated body parts of victims of a suicide terrorist attack. Similarly, Araweelo’s new friend recounts how her parents were mistaken for pirates and were shot dead in their illegal fishing boat. As the plot develops, this pessimism turns into a testament to persistence, and healing through family and unwavering love.

Director, screenwriter: Mo Harawe
Cast: Ahmed Ali Farah, Anab Ahmed Ibrahim, Ahmed Mohamud Saleban
Producers: Sabine Moser & Oliver Neumann
Cinematography: Mostafa El Kashef
Editing: Joana Scrinzi
Production design: Nuur Abdulkadir
Sound: Willis Abuto, Anne Gibourg, Guadalupe Cassius, Christophe Vingtrinier
Production company: FreibeuterFilm
World sales: Totem Films
Venue: Cannes Film Festival (Un Certain Regard)
In Somali, Arabic
133 minutes

Prior to his previous Cannes comeback with the uneven but widely praised Crimes of the Future (2022), Cronenberg spent almost a decade away from cinema, partly because he was caring for his wife Carolyn, who died of cancer in 2017. He has now channelled his grief into The Shrouds, which was initially planned as a multi-episode Netflix series.

After the streaming giant ultimately declined, Cronenberg honed the narrative down into a single two-hour feature. Which may explain why The Shrouds feels a little unruly and unfocussed, with too many loose threads and undernourished side plots. Even so, this is still an absorbingly weird autumnal statement from one of the most consistently original screen voices of his generation, still probing away at some familiar psychosexual obsessions, this time under a gathering cloud of looming mortality.

Marking his third collaboration with Cronenberg, but his first as leading man, Cassel borrows the director’s sleek white hair, poised mannerisms and tragic back story, He plays Karsh, the widowed boss of a Toronto-based company pioneering a macabre new kind of high-tech burial ground. Using digital wrap-around shrouds, motion-capture imaging and grave-mounted video screens, the company allows grieving clients to monitor the slow decay of their loved ones below ground. This long goodbye is presented as a consoling part of the grieving process, slowly severing the bonds of physical intimacy between living and dead.

Karsh has a lot on his mind. Despite being obsessively haunted by his late wife Becca (Diane Kruger), who is buried in one of his company’s digital shrouds, he is also cautiously looking to find love again. Unfortunately, his only close female friends are Becca’s eccentric, dog-loving, off-limits twin sister Terry (Kruger again) and Hunny, an annoyingly perky AI avatar who serves as his Siri-style online personal assistant.

Shaken out of his lonely, depressed trance by an act of unexplained vandalism at the burial ground, Karsh enlists his former brother-in-law Maury (Guy Pearce), a mentally fragile computer hacker, to help  track down the culprits. Their quest quickly becomes a murky jumble of plots involving ecological protest groups, sinister medical experiments, and one of Becca’s mysterious former lovers, who later became her cancer doctor. Meanwhile, sexual tension grows between Karsh and Terry, who is conveniently aroused by conspiracy theories, a classic piece of wry Cronenbergian erotic pathology.

There is plenty wrong with The Shrouds, notably its low-voltage suspense levels, clunky plot mechanics and open-ended narrative. It frequently plays more like a talk-heavy chamber drama than techno-gothic thriller, with too much verbose exposition and not enough action. The final act is particularly confusing, with its vague hints of Russian and Chinese spy plots, unexplained bodies buried in the wrong graves, contrived family rifts and more. There are also teasing signposts to emerging subplots in Iceland and Hungary that never materialise, chiefly because they began life as chapters in the cancelled Netflix series. It seems strangely clumsy for Cronenberg not to trim them from the stand-alone film’s plot.

All the same, there is still much to savour here for indulgent fans of the Canadian avant-pulp maestro. Casting Cassel as his screen alter ego was certainly a smart move by Cronenberg. All sharp angles and haughty intensity, the French actor is a magnetic presence in The Shrouds, a living piece of human sculpture who brings much-needed kinetic energy to a dry script and muted thriller plot. The autobiographical parallels between Cronenberg and Karsh also inspire some heartfelt, moving reflections on grief, loss and enduring love.

Since this is a Cronenberg film, we also get lofty ruminations on burial rites in different cultures, a teasing subtext of antisemitic hate crime in the desecration of Jewish graves, subtle homages to Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958)  in the lookalike love-triangle subplot, plus flashes of classic body horror. A handful of fever-dream sex scenes featuring bodies with mastectomy scars and amputated limbs are tender and lusty enough to annoy the kind of prissy killjoys who found Crash (1996) too disturbing. Which is a good thing, of course.

Craft and production design credits are also impeccable, from the radiant, fluid graphics that wash over the opening titles to Howard Shore’s brooding, electronics-heavy, Badalamenti-esque score. Cronenberg’s commendable bid to embrace the new digital mediascape of AI avatars and phone-cam footage is also sweet, albeit slightly clunky. The Shrouds is no masterpiece, but it throbs with the kind of quietly mesmerising psycho-sexual weirdness that no other director can replicate. Once again, even a minor Cronenberg movie contains more interesting ideas than most film-makers can muster at their best.

Director, screenwriter: David Cronenberg
Starring: Vincent Cassel, Diane Kruger, Guy Pearce, Sandrine Holt
Cinematography: Douglas Koch
Editing: Christopher Donaldson
Music: Howard Shore
Producers: David Cronenberg, Saïd Ben Saïd, Martin Katz, Anthony Vaccarello
Production companies: Prospero Pictures (Canada), SBS International (France), Saint Laurent Productions (France)
World sales: SBS International
Venue: Cannes film festival (Competition)
In English
116 minutes

For that, viewers can thank Xavier Sirven’s wonderfully brisk editing, Lojkine’s storytelling structure, and, above all, the ultra-credible lead performance of newcomer Abou Sangare. The actor’s cheekbones, presence, and ostensibly unpolished expressions all seem primed for the screen.

Without what this actor presents onscreen (aided by Lojkine and Delphine Agut’s deft screenwriting), this is a film that would fail, because so many of its elements are familiar. There’s the good immigrant, unreasonable white man, genial migrant community, and tearjerking exposition. But The Story of Souleymane is more than its individual parts. Scenes fly by, prompted by the move-move-move! ethos of the hustling immigrant. This is a film told close in close quarters. On several occasions, the camera is so close to our hero that you can smell the desperation coming off his skin, which, as richly and darkly lensed by Tristan Galand, is mutedly lustrous.

As the tale begins, we see the titular delivery man, originally from Guinea, hopping around Paris, ferrying food to customers ordering via a mobile app. Nothing about the job is strange in today’s world, but the peculiarity of Souleymane’s hustle is clear when we see what he does when his app requires a selfie to complete an order. He should simply raise the screen to his face as everyone does. Instead, he gets on his bike for several minutes to present his phone to another man. This man puts the phone to his face; it works. Clearly, the delivery app’s account isn’t Souleymane’s.

This scene serves as a skillful introduction to this other character, who will become important to the tale being told. It also shows the direness of Souleymane’s position. Apparently, his stay in France is reliant on the kindness and the business of others. He has a place to sleep on certain nights because of an organisation catering to the homeless. But the revenue he gets from using another man’s food delivery app will be split with the actual owner of the account. His immigration status in this new country excludes employment, so Souleymane is a digital tenant in this other man’s building.

That can only change if Souleymane passes an interview with the French government. For that, he needs to memorise a few lies about his life before coming to France. He also needs to pay for documents that would lend credence to his lies. For both of those things, he needs a coach who demands payment for his services.

The entire film is wrapped around this all-important interview, which is a marked difference from Lojkine’s previous picture Hope and, say, Io Capitano, Italy’s submission for the 2024 Oscars and 2023’s most successful film in the Africa in Big Festival genre. Where the Matteo Garrone film traced an immigrant’s journey from an impoverished Africa to a prosperous Europe, The Story of Souleymane is about the second half of the story: What happens when the immigrant has played and won that dangerous game of crossing over?

For Souleymane, what happens is a struggle to earn a living in a system that doesn’t exactly want the immigrant to thrive on the same level as the white people he meets. But the situation is more of an indictment of successive African governments, which have made living in a Western country that doesn’t want you continue to be coveted by many Africans. As our hero explains in one of the film’s two very moving scenes, he tried but just couldn’t make things work in his country.

Both The Story of Souleymane and Io Capitano are directed by Europeans who do not have the experiences they are presenting to viewers. Which, in today’s culture landscape, is derided by certain people. But when a filmmaker makes a film that works as well as this one does, commentary of that sort is moot. And when he is able to direct Sangare, who hasn’t worked as an actor before, in those two very moving scenes—one in which he sheds tears and another, the climactic scene, in which he fights back tears—even the most strident politically correct detractor has to admit that Lojkine and crew have gotten things cinematically right.

One can only hope that African filmmakers, those who uphold the struggling immigrant pillar in the Africa in Big Festival genre, will make work as engaging and moving as this one. Indeed, Nabil Ayouch, who is African, has a film in Cannes around the same idea of the oppressed in a stifling society. His is titled Everybody Loves Touda. Lojkine’s film is the stronger of the two. And it would be highly deserving if The Story of Souleymane leaves the Un Certain Regard section of the 2024 Cannes Film Festival with an award.

Director: Boris Lojkine
Screenplay: Delphine Agut, Boris Lojkine
Cast: Abou Sangare, Nina Meurisse, Alpha Oumar Sow, Emmanuel Yovanie, Emmanuel Yovanie, Younoussa Diallo
Producers: Bruno Nahon
Cinematography: Tristan Galand
Editing: Xavier Sirven
Sound: Marc-Olivier Brulle
Production Company: UNITÉ
World Sales: Pyramide International
Venue: Cannes Film Festival (Un Certain Regard)
In French
92 minutes

Touda, played by the magnetic Nisren Erradi, is the impoverished daughter of a peasant couple living in a Morocco we don’t see in tourist brochures. Throughout the film, her goal is to establish herself as a credible Shikeha, an art of vocal poetry perfected by female performers at weddings, gatherings, and carnivals. In many cases, the performers are stigmatized for singing.

Aita literally means crying, but the performance allows the singer to express herself in a celebratory manner, which ranges from romance, religious chanting and sadness to euphoria. In the opening credits, Ayoush gives context of what a Shikeha is, enough to introduce a non-Middle Eastern audience to the music genre being performed.

As the story slowly unfolds, Touda is constantly reminded (mostly by men but also by her fellow female singers and dancers) that she is not an artist, but an entertainment number and a dancing body for the pleasure of men. Even her brother, who is ashamed of her, calls her a Shikeha to humiliate her.

The cost of performing in male-dominated spaces and depending on money coming mainly from men at weddings, parties, or clubs, is being a constant target for unwanted sexual advances. This reaches a peak in the first scene when Touda is chased through a dark forest in her traditional clothes by a group of drunken men, who end up gang-raping her. She doubles up on toughness, yet continues to celebrate her femininity. Despite these harassments, she resists verbally and physically, and teaches her deaf-mute son Yassine (Joud Chamihy) how to fight off bullies at school.

In the impoverished district where she lives, there are no schools for children with special needs. Nor is there any prospect of her becoming a proper Shikeha. So she sets her eyes on Casablanca, to find a suitable school for her son and pursue her dreams. Talented as she is, it doesn’t take her long to get a job as a pop singer in a cabaret, where she is constantly reminded that she is no Um Kalthoum and that she has to play nice and entertain the male audience who are not here just for a drink and a song.

There is a symbolism in Touda’s attempt to survive financially, socially, and sometimes physically by preserving of the almost vanishing art of Aita. Like several genres of traditional art in the Middle East and North Africa (the most famous being belly dancing), it is either commercialized, sexualised, or brought back to life for entertaining bourgeois audiences, hence losing many aspects of its authenticity.

Written by Ayoush and fellow filmmaker Maryam Touzani (The Blue Caftan), the plot of Everybody Loves Touda is sensually expressed in Erradi’s whirling, energetic performance, and visually told by the brilliant, soft camerawork of Virginie Surdej, expressing the character’s ups and downs.

The end of the film might disappoint admirers of the easily digested narrative of a brown Arab woman oppressed by men who finally triumphs and overcomes all the challenges, or ends up dead. Ayoush plays against this kind of classic melodrama. Instead he puts her firmly in charge of her own sexuality and pleasure, making for a brilliant and original conclusion.

Director: Nabil Ayouch
Screenwriters: Nabil Ayouch, Maryam Touzani
Cast: Nisrin Erradi, Joud Chamihy, Jalila Talemsi, Lahcen Razzougui, El Moustafa Boutankite, Abdellatif Chaouqi, Khalil Oubaaqa
Producers: Nabil Ayouch, Amine Benjelloun, Sebastian Schelenz, Katrin Pors, Mikkel Jersin, Eva Jakobsen, Marleen Slot, Elisa Fernanda Pirir
Cinematography: Virginie Surdej
Editing: Nicolas Rumpl
Production design: Eve Martin
Music: Kristian Eidnes Andersen, Flemming Nordkrog
Production company: Les Films du Nouveau Monde, Ali n’ Productions, Snowglobe, Viking Film, Stær, Velvet Films
World sales: MK2 
Venue: Cannes Film Festival (Cannes Premiere)
In Arabic, French
102 minutes

After fourteen years, Ale (frequent Trueba writing and acting collaborator Itsana Arano) and Alex (Vito Sanz) have decided its time for them to move on. There’s no explicit reason why they’ve decided to part ways, but as they discuss the situation early in the film, in their minds there’s not much distance between getting married and breaking up. Both are an acknowledgement and reaction to the fact that things can’t stand as they are. But Ale and Alex have decided to go out with a bang by hosting a party to celebrate their separation. As they make the rounds to their friends and family to announce the news and proffer invitations, they are met almost uniformly with shock. Described as “the perfect couple” and “legends of love,” no one can fathom that Ale and Alex, who continue to get along (mostly) swimmingly, so can calmly end their union, and predictions fly that they’ll just wind up back together again.

As they work through the final stages of their relationship, Ale, a film director, is also grappling with the edit of her latest picture, one that just happens to star Alex, an actor. This meta touch by Trueba unspools episodes of Ale and Alex’s dissolution within the movie she’s cutting. At first, it seems like this intellectual exercise — within a script that casually references Soren Kierkegaard’s “Repetition” and Stanley Cavell’s “Pursuits of Happiness” — may overrun the film’s gentle and warm emotional centre. But Trueba stays light fingered on the self-referential gambit allowing Ale and Alex to blossom even as they’re falling apart.

Trueba effortlessly captures the habits and mannerisms of people who’ve learned to be with someone so thoroughly, that they’re now ready to live without them. It’s not that their love is gone, but perhaps, it’s the sense of discovery that has disappeared. Ale and Alex will comfortably accompany each other to view potential new apartments in one scene, while work through disagreements in the next. But voices are never raised and any resentments are as easily cleared as their frequently clogged kitchen sink. The depth of understanding they have with each other is illustrated in one of the film’s most beautiful moments. After a passive-aggressive quarrel between the pair Ale leaves the house, and Alex retreats to the bedroom. Looking at the bedsheets, he realizes that Ale has just started her period. He quietly removes the dirtied linen and puts down fresh bedding. It might be the most romantic gesture you see on screen all year.

There are few directors who capture summer in Madrid as wonderfully as Trueba. Working with regular cinematographer Santiago Racaj, even as everyone leaves the city during its hottest months, for the filmmakers its this time of year when it shines best as a gorgeous, sun-kissed oasis (a vibe they also transmit in Trueba’s wonderful The August Virgin). It’s a season for opening your windows and greeting the neighbors across the way, escaping into museums for the air conditioning, and idling around flea markets. Racaj and Trueba detail Ale and Alex’s slow move to individual independence like a pleasant vacation where no one’s in a hurry for it to end. “…that’s the film’s premise,” Ale’s editor says in defense of an early cut of her film, “…it progresses by means of accumulation.” So too does The Other Way Around, a tender sendoff to once star crossed lovers that firmly believes they’ll always be in each other’s universe.

Director: Jonas Trueba
Screenwriters: Jonas Trueba
Cast: Itsaso Arana, Vito Sanz
Producer: Javier Lafuente, Jonas Trueba
Cinematography: Santiago Racaj
Editing: Marta Velasco
Production design: Miguel Angel Rebollo
Sound: Alvaro Silva Wuth, Pablo Rivas Leyva
Production companies: Los Ilusos Films (Spain), Les Films du Worso (France)
World Sales: Memento International
Venue: Cannes Film Festival (Directors’ Fortnight)
In Spanish
114 minutes