Paris (AFP) – Nineteen films were announced Thursday in the main competition at Cannes Film Festival, which kicks off on the French Riviera on May 13. Another handful will be added in the coming weeks, festival director Thierry Fremaux told reporters in Paris.
Here are the confirmed movies so far:
– **’A Simple Accident’ by Jafar Panahi (Iran)**
The repeatedly detained Iranian director “asked us not say anything about his movie”, Fremaux said, alluding to the pressures on him in his homeland.
– **’The Phoenician Scheme’ by Wes Anderson (US)**
A spy comedy starring Benicio Del Toro, Tom Hanks, Bill Murray, Scarlett Johansson, and Mia Threapleton, Kate Winslet’s daughter.
– **’Young Mothers’ by Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne (Belgium)**
The Belgian brothers, who have already won the Palme d’Or for best film twice (“Rosetta” in 1999 and “The Child” in 2005), tell the story of five young mothers staying in a maternity home in their native Belgium.
– **’Alpha’ by Julia Ducournau (France)**
Four years after winning the Palme d’Or with *Titane*, the French director presents a new film starring Iranian-French Golshifteh Farahani and Tahar Rahim about a young girl confronted with the AIDS epidemic in the 1980s.
– **’Sentimental Value’ by Joachim Trier (Norway)**
A comedy drama featuring a filmmaker trying to reconnect with his daughters from a director whose last feature, *The Worst Person in the World*, also premiered in competition at Cannes in 2021.
– **’Romeria’ by Carla Simon (Spain)**
The Spanish director returns to her traumatic childhood with a family journey of a young Catalan girl in Galicia who has lost her parents to AIDS.
– **’Sound of Falling’ by Mascha Schilinski (Germany)**
A drama that brings together four women from four different generations living on the same farm.
– **’Eagles of the Republic’ by Tarik Saleh (Sweden/Egypt)**
On the brink of losing everything, Egypt’s most adored actor accepts a role he can’t refuse under pressure from the country’s authorities.
– **’The Mastermind’ by Kelly Reichardt (US)**
The story of an art heist set against the backdrop of the Vietnam War and the nascent women’s liberation movement.
– **’Dossier 137′ by Dominik Moll (France)**
An investigator at France’s IGPN agency, which investigates police abuses, probes an incident in which a police officer injures a young man during a protest.
– **’The Secret Agent’ by Kleber Mendonça Filho (Brazil)**
A political thriller set in the late 1970s, during the final years of Brazil’s military dictatorship.
– **’Fuori’ by Mario Martone (Italy)**
A biopic about the Italian actor and writer Goliarda Sapienza.
– **’Two Prosecutors’ by Sergei Loznitsa (Ukraine)**
A film by a Ukrainian director, whose documentary about the “madness of war” screened at Cannes last year, set in the 1930s USSR during Stalin’s purges.
– **’Nouvelle Vague’ by Richard Linklater (US)**
A film set in 1960 Paris about the making of Jean-Luc Godard’s cinema classic *Breathless*.
– **’Sirat’ by Oliver Laxe (Spain)**
A “road movie of misfits, of people outside society,” according to Fremaux.
– **’The Last One’ by Hafsia Herzi (France)**
The French actor and director adapts Fatima Daas’s eponymous novel, telling the story of the youngest member of an Algerian immigrant family who gradually frees herself from her family and traditions.
– **’The History of Sound’ by Oliver Hermanus (South Africa)**
During World War I, two young men decide to record the lives, voices and music of their American compatriots.
– **’Renoir’ by Chie Hayakawa (Japan)**
A drama about coming of age, resilience, the healing power of imagination, and a traumatised family struggling to reconnect.
– **’Eddington’ by Ari Aster (US)**
A film about contemporary America, starring Joaquin Phoenix.
© 2024 AFP
