Cannes Film Festival currently blossoming in the French Riviera has been taking place there since 1946. It’s a fashion runway, a platform for celebrity meetings as well as the most important marketplace for film buyers and sellers from 140 nations. Each year the festival becomes a trendsetter for the global movie industry starting the cycle of premieres and culminating in award season.
The world of movies has become very disintegrated and scattered in recent years but this festival has grown in influence as it is well-known that irrespective of the amount of money invested in a film each one of them is primarily evaluated in respect of their cultural and ethical quality.
Films introduced at Cannes in 2024 received 31 Academy Awards nominations and 9 won this year. Those winners included Demi Moore’s horror movie “The Substance” set in L.A but shot in France. Palm d’Or prize winner “Anora”, the Sean Baker’s creation, won five Oscars (including Best Picture). They say that the tastes of the judges in European Cannes and Venice film festivals each year are coming closer to those of the decision makers of the American Oscars.
This year the situation on the very diverse film market is very complicated as President Trump on May 4 announced his intention to slap 100% tariffs on movies “produced in foreign lands”. This announcement raised confusion and panic in the industry as it relies on a complicated mixture of stories, directors, talented actors and above all on cheaper cost of production all over the world so very few films are nowadays of a single country production.
The industry bosses in the States are now trying to push for greater government tax bonuses to create incentives for wider domestic shooting. “Fact is that American cinema has been one of our country’s most successful and consistent forms of export both in terms of business and culture”, says Glen Basner, founder of sales firm FilmNation.
The festival competition at Cannes opened last week with reviews for the “Sound of Falling” director Mascha Shilinski’s second film which tells the stories about female characters on a German farm across a century. One of the critics has called the film an “intimate epic of unnerving brilliance”.
Other films include director Ari Aster’s “Eddington”, a drama that digs into the hostilities that boiled over during the Covid pandemic, starring Joaquin Phoenix, Pedro Pascal and Emma Stone.
Actors Paul Mescal and Josh O’Connor may get a moment of glory over their “History of Sound”, a period romance between two men who collect field recordings in Maine.
Actors making their debuts as directors include Kristen Stewart with “The Cronology of Water”, Harris Dickinson with “Urchin” and Scarlett Johansson with “Eleanor the Great” featuring 95-year-old June Squibb.
Filmmaker Richard Linklater is competing in the festival with “Nouvelle Vague”, which imagines the making of “Breathless”, the 1960 Jean-Luc Godard film that was the essence of the new-wave moment. “Nouvelle Vague” is a black-and-white film with French dialogue from a Texan director known for the stoner comedy “Dazed and Confused”. There are big risks in premiering this film in Cannes as the legacy of the “Breathless” is sacred for France. But critics note that “it’s a film about young people putting on a show, and we believe Americans will love it”.
By Natalia Dalby
