France – Cannes Film Festival: French film strength – Public Good

The French year

We waited Arnaud Desplechin and Jean-Paul Rappeneau. This will Audiard Brizé, Donzelli and Maïwenn. Two men and two women, two and two new regulars. Beautiful parity

Jacques Audiard has already come three times, notably with A Self-Made Hero (Screenplay 1996) and A Prophet (Grand Jury Prize 2009). He returns with Dheepan, political film about the journey of a Tamil refugee in France, caretaker of a city in the Paris suburbs. Freely inspired by Persian Letters Montesquieu story.

After Poliss, Jury Award 2011 Maïwenn competes with My King, a complicated passion, less scandalous than incestuous story of Marguerite and Julien, the Another French director competing for the Palme d’Or. With this script written for Truffaut, Valérie Donzelli entered in the competition, four years after opening the Critics’ Week with The war is declared.

Stéphane Brizé go up the stairs also for the first time with the law of the market.

Women

If Emmanuelle Bercot, with Catherine Deneuve, is the opening of the festival out of competition with High Head, Maïwenn and Valérie Donzelli are the only women vying for the Palme d’Or awarded by a jury with two heads, Joel (60) and Ethan (57) Coen, succeeding the New Zealand Jane Campion.

The parallel section Un Certain Regard is also dominated by men, with only two female directors on stage the official selection: the young Iranian Ida Panahandeh (with Nahid) and French Alice Winocour (with Maryland)

Map. and territories

The festival has the ambition to “put new names, films and countries on the movie map” assured yesterday the general delegate Thierry Fremaux.

This geography, skipping over Africa or South America, maintains a strong European centrality and gives pride regulars such as Italians Nanni Moretti, Matteo Garrone and Paolo Sorrentino, Chinese Jia Zhang-ke, or even Japanese Hirokazu Kore-eda. Todd Haynes and Gus Van Sant are, themselves, their return.

The newcomers are Greek Yorgos Lanthimos, Norwegian Joachim Trier, Canadian Denis Villeneuve and Australian Justin Kurzel, already known for their cinema . Cannes is, however, the risk of a first film, the Hungarian Laszlo Nemes with the son of Saul, the story of a Hungarian prisoner working in a crematorium at Auschwitz in 1944, trying to save a boy flame he takes for his son.