The Cannes Film Festival slowly finishes and it is already time to draw an outcome of these ten intense days of cinema. I will first remember some films: Je veux voir (I Want To See) by Joanna Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige, Ils mourront tous sauf moi (They Will All Die But Me) by the young Russian director (20 years) Valeira Gaï Guermanika, the two excellent interpretations of Jean-Pierre Darroussin (Le voyage aux Pyrenees (The Journey to the Pyrenees) and Les grandes personnes (Grown Ups)), L...
Thursday May 22nd, 4PM, Grand Théâtre Lumière: this is the end of the screening of Frontier of Dawn (La Frontière de l'aube) directed by Philippe Garrel taking part in the Official Competition. The audience’s reception is cold, icy even. It hoots, it whistles in the theatre… (without mentioning the ceaseless movements of all these exasperated spectators running out of the theatre). The following day, the cinema critics broke out in the press. Frontier of Dawn is attacked in the majority ...
While strolling about in the Film Market, I stopped at the « Cinema from Spain » stand in order to discover and to try to understand all subtleties of it.What is the principle of the Market of film?It is an international meeting about cinema. It gathers a broad panel of the cinema professions. Here are producers, distributors, international sales agents, actors, script writers… We are here to collaborate with other countries and to manage to satisfy the audience. On this Spanish stand, we a...
On the subject too seldom tackled of voluntary interruptions of pregnancy, Les bureaux de Dieu (God’s Offices) by Claire Simon moves by its sensitivity and the force of the speech which emerges from it.Part of the Director’s Fortnight, the film infiltrates the walls of a family planning. We discover there the team made of psychologists, social workers, nurses, gynaecologists… in their work of accompaniment of young girls and older women who find themselves confronted to a nondesired pregna...
In Cannes, the accreditations make a lot of envious. Near the Palace, a true “hunting for tickets” is open. Evening dresses and placards are required. Meeting with one of them. Does it really work “hunting for tickets”?With a placard like this it does not work very well. The most important is to act discreetly, to speak with the people… But day after day, it becomes more and mor...
Marco Tullio Giordana (The Best of Youth) comes back to the Cannes Film Festival in order to present his new film, Mad Blood (Sanguepazzo). This film is about an episode during the Mussolini period through the destinies of two Italian fascist cinema actors: Osvaldo Valenti and Luisa Ferida. An anticonformist couple in public as in private life, they were part of the Salo Republic. Five days after the liberation, they got killed.This story, which obsessed the Milanese director for many years, is ...
Adolescence is one paradoxical moment in life. It is an ungrateful period between the childhood and the adulthood when the body changes and people experience life. Presented in the Director’s Fortnight and running for the Golden Camera (price rewarding the best first film), Acne by Federico Veiroj tells the story of an adolescence through the eyes of a 13 year old boy, Rafa.For a few years, the interest around adolescence and the fascination caused among directors have not ceased growing. The ...
At the steps of the Festival’s Palace a handle the irreducible persons is bound each day to be among the first at the time of the procession of the stars. I met one of them to discuss in order to better understand what pushes her to wait, wait, and wait.Why are you staying here?We do it to see the stars as close as possible.At what time did you arrive?We’re arriving everyday at 7 AM. Today, it’s a little bit special; we just arrived at 9 AM. We are staying here from the morning to the even...
Small UFO in the current cinematographic landscape, Rumba will charm the cinema lovers with its old-fashioned burlesque form! By reapropriating themselves the codes of this genre, Dominique Abel, Fiona Gordon and Bruno Romy are playing admirably with these filmic forms for a long time established.Dom and Fiona are in love and work as teachers in the same elementary school. Their couple is welded by the love they share for their common passion: the rumba. Unfortunately, a car accident comes to co...
Sometimes in order to see a film in Cannes it is necessary to wake up early, even very early! Each screening being strongly coveted, the various theatres see long very long queues of people waiting. The audience is ready to wait sometimes more than one hour and a half (the time of a film…) before being able (hopefully!) to enter the theatre. And this waiting takes place whatever the weather is, of course… And all that for films, which will be released in a few weeks (look at Indiana Jones) o...
Real “coup de Coeur” of this beginning of Festival, Je veux voir (I Want To See) by Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige is a little cinematographic pearl all in smoothness and sensibility. Screened at “Un Certain regard”, this docu-drama sends Catherine Deneuve (as herself) to the south of Lebanon, a region destroyed by the recent war. Accompanied by Rabih, a young man who comes back to his homeland, she travels across the ruins of a nation, disappeared forever. F...
One of the most surprising thing at the Cannes Film Festival is that you see all the people you know in the seventh Art. At the corner of a street, on a queue before a film screening,... they are just everywhere ! The cinema world is small, Cannes reunites all the cinema world, thus Cannes is small. CQFD ! Aurélie ...
After Peindre ou faire l’amour, Jean-Marie et Arnaud Larrieu comme back to the Cannes Film Festival presenting in the Director’s Fortnight Le Voyage aux Pyrénées. Jean-Pierre Darroussin et Sabine Azéma are Alexandre and Aurore, a famous actors couple who are in the Pyrenean mountains to cure Aurore from her nymphomaniac crisis. In these green landscapes, they meet some journalists, a wild woman, some curious people, a Bulgarian bear smoking on a roc, three singers-poets priests (whose the...
There are many clichés about the Cannes Film Festival conveyed notably by Television. These clichés have become rooted in the spirits and the collective imaginary and they are resisting. I have been in Cannes for 24 hours and to my surprise my “Cannes fantasies” are already vanishing. The first of all these ideas one has before coming to the Croisette is that in Cannes, during the ten days of the festival and in every sections, we just see big films (you must understand good, very good!) ...
« It’s an odd place where to show films which are not sure of a theatre release to people who are not sure to go and see them, but the oddest of this thing, with Cannes, is the result of all this effervescence: to give the desire to see films, the desire to make films, the desire to love film. »Gilles Jacob« Cannes is the cinema: glamour and rigour, silly and serious, sexual and cerebral, excessive and refined, art and business, the ridiculous and the sublime. An elitism so discriminatory, ...
Have you always dreamt of enjoying the warm atmosphere of Cannes during the world’s most prestigious film festival? The red carpet of the Festival Palace, parties on the beach and films, films, films… Make your dream come true simply by taking part in our contest “Become a Cineuropean”. You will be invited to Cannes to write a blog on your daily experiences about the European films you see and many other exciting events. Just answer ten questions and write a brief article about a Europ...
Here under is a summary of the contest's regulations:OrganiserThe non-profit association Cineuropa, running the website http://www.cineuropa.org/, here under called "the organising company", registered in the Belgian Monitor under the reference code 882082366 and based at Avenue Besme 84 - 1190 Brussels - Belgium, organises between April 1 and 25, 2008, a game-contest entitled "Become a Cineuropean".Principle of the contestThe participants will have to answer a questionnaire ...
CINEUROPA.ORG - The Best Of European CinemaThe European film industry and film lovers of European films finally have a web site dedicated entirely to them and published in no less than four languages, English, French, Italian, and Spanish.Read by many hundred of thousands people all around the World, Cineuropa.org publishes daily news about the most important events of the European film landscape, weekly interviews and focuses of films soon to be released, making of and special reports. Cineurop...
