Expect no expensive champagnes or posh parties at Cannes this year.
The global financial crisis has hit the 62nd Cannes International Film Festival in France, an extravagant galore of movies and merrymaking, canceling events like the much-talked Vanity Fair bash at Hotel du Cap.
According to the U.K.’s The Independent:
Beth Kseniak, spokesperson for Condé Nast, Vanity Fair’s publisher, said: “Given the economic situation, we decided to forgo our dinner this year.”
David Lissard, the deputy mayor of Cannes, said that companies were wary of flaunting their wealth in the current climate. “People are afraid it is bad for their image to be seen in a place associated with wealth,” he said.
However, the Cannes International Film Festival is not about posh parties but movies at their best.
Twenty movies have been selected for the competition category representing stories from around the globe.
From the “Brokeback Mountain” director Ang Lee’s “Taking Woodstock” (USA) to Quentin Tarantino’s “Inglorious Basterds” (Germany/USA) and Gaspar Noe’s “Enter the Void” (France/Germany/Italy), there are movies that might captivate the world audience in the coming days.
Click here for the complete list.
“Spider-Man” and “The Grudge” famed Sam Raimi’s “Drag Me To Hell” will be screened in the Out of Competition category.
The Guardian’s film critic, Peter Bradshaw, has his list of favorites.
In his blog he mentions Andrea Arnold, director of “Fish Tank,” nominee for theis year’s Golden Palm—the highest recognition for a film at the Cannes, and the 2003 Oscar winning short film “Wasp.”
Bradshaw also lists Jane Campion, the only woman to have won the Golden Palm, better known as Palme d’Or. He names Michael Haneke and Gaspar Noé as the big shockers at this year’s festival.
Haneke’s film is The White Ribbon, about events at a rural German school in 1913 (I don’t need to say “sinister” events or “deeply disturbing” events or “spine-chillingly bloody awful” events with this director. I don’t think that the events portrayed are going to be nice and imply that the German and European history that followed 1913 was one big unfortunate aberration.) With his surveillance thriller Hidden, Haneke showed us one of the best films of the new century; The White Ribbon will be one of the hottest tickets of Cannes 2009. As for Gaspar Noé, his unbelievably horrifying rape-revenge nightmare Irrevérsible in 2002 still lives in my mind, like traces of malaria in the bloodstream of an infected patient. Noé is a legend for this film, which had people being carried in a dead faint out of the Palais, where paramedics had been, a little melodramatically, placed on standby. His competition film this year has had a long gestation – I have been hearing about it for seven years – and it is called Enter the Void, about the death of a drug dealer in Japan. It is understood to be the most expensive film this director has so far made.
Of other moviemakers and movies in his list includes Jacques Audiard and his movie “A Prophet” (France), Lou Ye’s “Spring Fever” (China) and South Korean director Park Chan-woo’s “Thirst.”
Apart from all the big names and competing movies, this year’s Cannes also sees the debut of three features from Nepal—a landmark for the growing Nepali film industry.
The Chicago Tribune, quoting Barbara Scharres, programming director of the Gene Siskel Film Center, writes:
“It’s the world’s biggest marketplace of new movies.”
Beyond the 20 titles competing for the Palme d’Or, thousands more are scheduled for an official debut as part of one of several juried sidebars (the new Francis Coppola film, “Tetro,” dominates the Directors’ Fortnight slate) or the market, where the Estonian film representative can be found alongside the delegation from Turkey, or Iceland.
The 62nd Cannes International Film Festival begins May 13 through May 24.
Please come back as we blog from the festival site at Cannes, France.
1 Comment
May 12, 2009 at 4:51 pm
I’m dying to see most of this year’s films