CANNES 2016: DIRECTOR'S FORTNIGHT LINE-UP ANNOUNCED

CANNES, April 19: Artistic director Edouard Waintrop (pictured, below) set a solemn tone at the press conference to announce the line-up for the 2016 Director’s Fortnight sidebar. In an emotion-filled speech, he paid tribute to the late Israeli actor/director Ronit Elkabetz, who had succumbed to cancer only hours before after a long and determined fight.

In 2014, Waintrop had programmed Gett: The Trial of Viviane Amsalem, the 51 year-old auteur’s most acclaimed work. Elkabetz, a mother of four year-old twins to husband Avner Yashar, had served the Cannes Film Festival with honour in 2015 as Jury President at the Critic’s Week sidebar.

Following his kind words, Waintrop proceeded to the order of the day and the unveiling of the 2016 Director’s Fortnight selection. Slightly down in number from the traditional 20 films to a tighter 18, the selection skews heavily to European productions. Italian filmmaker Marco Bellocchio’s Sweet Dreams, starring Berenice Bejo, snared the Opening Night slot and is one of three films from the country to feature in the sidebar (alongside Paolo Virzi’s Like Crazy and Claudio Giovannesi’s Fiore). The region’s strong showing should go some way to silencing dissent that arose when no Italian works were for Official Competition. (Pictured, right; director Marco Bellocchio)

Homegrown fare features strongly, with French cinema accounting for seven titles in the mix. They are Sebastien Lifshitz’s Les Vies de Therese; Rachid Djaidani’s volatile racial drama, Tour de France; Claude Barras’ stop-motion drama My Life as a Courgette; Sacha Wolff’s Mercenaire; Joachim Lafosse’s L’econimique du couple, a co-production with Belgium; the late Solveig Anspach’s L’effet aquatique; and, Uda Benyamina’s Divines.

Other continental entrants include Denmark’s Wolf and Sheep, from Afghani director Shahrbanoo Sadat; Neruda, the Gael Garcia Bernal thriller from Pablo Larrain that sourced production funds from France, Spain, Chile and Argentina (pictured, left); and, the legendary Alejandro Jodorowsky’s Endless Poetry, a co-production between France, Chile and Japan. 

Tough-guy American auteur Paul Schrader closes the sidebar with his noir-ish crime melodrama Dog Eat Dog, starring Nicholas Cage (reteaming with the director after the trouble-plagued Dying of The Light) and Willem Dafoe. Other North American entrants include Laura Poitras’ Risk, a study of Wikileaks founder Julian Assange; and, Two Lovers and a Bear, the highly anticipated follow-up to War Witch from director Kim Nguyen.

Asian cinema’s sole representative is Psycho Raman, a serial killer thriller from India directed by Gang’s of Wasseypur helmer Anurag Kashyup. The cinema of the United Kingdom was shut out, as was representation from New Zealand or Australia (despite the readiness of Cannes favourite Cate Shortland's latest, Berlin Syndrome).

The Director's Fortnight/Quinzaine des Realisateurs sidebar, overseen by the French Director's Guild, runs May 12-22 as part of the 2016 Festival de Cannes.