The Cannes Film Festival opens tomorrow with tough social commentaries and high-powered action epics, as well as sci-fi thrillers lining up for the race for top honours at the world’s leading movie showcase.
Once dubbed by US director Quentin Tarantino as the “cinematic Olympics”, the festival is also set to celebrate movie-making and the cult of the celebrity with its traditional flair and a slew of A-list stars.
These include Michael Fassbender, Benicio Del Toro, Gabriel Byrne, Marion Cotillard, Colin Farrell, Rachel Weisz, Jesse Eisenberg, Harvey Keitel, Josh Brolin and Emily Blunt, who are all slated to appear on Cannes’ famed red carpet.
But making a break from the flashy and often light-hearted movies that normally launch the 11-day film extravaganza, this year’s opening film tells the story of a troubled teenager named Malony.
The film, La Tete Haute (Standing Tall) from French director Emmanuell Bercot, will also mark the first time in 28 years that a woman director has opened what has frequently been accused of being a male-dominated festival.
La Tete Haute is being screened out of competition so is not in the running for prizes.
Bercot also stars as a woman trying to recover from a destructive romance in actress-turned-director Maiwenn’s Mon Roi, which is one of five French films competing in the 19-film race for the iconic Palme d’Or.
Paris-born Jacques Audiard, who specialises in gritty tales from the underside of French life, also returns to Cannes with a drama called Dheepan about a Sri Lankan Tamil fighter working as a caretaker in the tough Paris suburbs.
A 1950s lesbian love story from US independent director Todd Haynes and starring Cate Blanchett and Rooney Mara is also part of the festival’s main competition.
Former Palme d’Or winner, Gus Van Sant, also returns with his suicide drama, The Sea of Trees, starring Matthew McConaughey, Ken Watanabe and Naomi Watts.
Now in its 68th year, the festival’s nine-member jury headed by the US film-making brothers Joel and Ethan Coen will also consider for the festival’s top prizes new film-making talent.
This includes Greek Yorgos Lanthimos’s The Lobster about the terrible fate awaiting those who break the rules in a futuristic tale about finding a partner.
Hungary’s Laszlo Nemes’s first feature film Son of Saul and Australia’s Justin Kurzel’s Macbeth, based on the Shake-spearean play, are to premiere in Cannes.
A protege of the great Hungarian director Bela Tarr, Nemes’s movie is a fictionalised account of life in a concentration camp.
Canadian director Denis Villeneuve’s Mexican drugs drama Sicario is expected to bring some high-voltage action and tension to the Croisette, the palm-lined boulevard that cuts through Cannes.
The post-apocalyptic world of Mad Max is also back this year, this time starring Britain’s Tom Hardy in the title role in the fourth in the series which launched Mel Gibson on the path to stardom 36 years ago.
undefinedSet in outback Australia and directed by George Miller, Mad Max: Fury Road is to be screened out of competition with the festival acting as the launching pad for the movie’s global release.
It has also taken Miller’s film more than two decades to reach the screen after running into production problems. It also stars Charlize Theron as a new character, Furiosa.
Chinese director Jia Zhangke offers a rather different take on Australia in Mountains May Depart.
After emerging more than 12 years ago on the world cinema stage with his unsettling portrayals of China’s transformation, Jia’s new movie is his first feature film shot outside China.
Jia’s new film spans several decades beginning in China and ending in the future in Australia.
Mountains May Depart is one of three movies from Asia in the competition line-up in Cannes, which also includes veteran Taiwanese director Hou Hsiao-Hsien.
Hou makes his seventh bid for a Palme d’Or with a martial arts drama set in China’s imperial Tang dynasty (618-907 AD) called The Assassin.
Also making the pilgrimage again to Cannes to present his new movie Our Little Sister will be Japan’s Hirokazu Koreeda.
Showcasing Italian cinema this year will be Cannes stalwarts Paolo Sorrentino, Nanni Moretti and Matteo Garrone.
Sorrentino makes his sixth appearance in Cannes main competition with Youth with Michael Caine starring as a retired orchestra conductor facing a fading career.
In Mia Madre, Margherita Buy plays a film-maker facing up to a series of behind-the-scenes crises, while Garrone’s film is based on the 17th-century fairy tale collection by Giambattista Basile.
DPA