From Hollywood legends to canine reporters, The Cannes Film Festival which kicked off on Tuesday has attracted a large gathering in the south of France.
France’s Camille Cottin hosted the opening ceremony on Tuesday along with guest of honour, Meryl Streep, ahead of a gala screening of French film The Second Act, starring Léa Sedoux and Vincent Lindon.
But aside from the 22 films competing for the prestigious Palme d’Or and a host of other prizes, there is plenty of action in and around the Croisette.
Dogs on the red carpet
Messi, the canine star of Oscar-winning Anatomy of a Fall, which also took the top prize at Cannes last year, will return to the festival as a red-carpet interviewer.
Using a 360-degree microphone and camera attached to his back, the border collie will chat with stars thanks to an actor behind the scenes for an 8-part miniseries.
“He’s the star. I’m just lending him my voice,” says comedian Raphael Mezrahi.
The resulting short clips will be available on French channels and TikTok.
Messi earned global attention for his role as Snoop in Anatomy of a Fall, winning the Palm Dog prize for best canine performance at Cannes.
He was a hit on social media when he was snapped with the likes of Ryan Gosling, Bradley Cooper and Billie Eilish during the Oscar campaign.
Coach and owner Laura Martin said it took two months to perfect the scene in which he had to feign intoxication and vomiting.
The Palm Dog, founded by Toby Rose in 2001, is awarded on the last Friday of the festival. Previous winners include Uggie from The Artist (2011).
Immersive cinema
Keen to keep up with new technology, festival organisers this year will launch the Immersive Competition to explore new frontiers in filmmaking.
Eight films from countries including France, as well as Taiwan, Canada and the United States, are in the running, while six other works will be shown out of competition.
Organised with the support of the National Centre for Cinema, the Immersive Competition includes collective virtual reality installations, mixed reality experiences, as well as video mapping and holographic works.
They will be displayed in a 1,300-square-metre exhibition space at the Cannes Cineum – the cinema complex of Cannes La Bocca – and the Georges Méliès Campus, a university dedicated to creative writing and film.
Iranian tensions
Mohammad Rasoulof’s much-awaited film The Seed of the Sacred Fig is in the main competition this year, and it is unclear if the director will attend the premiere at Cannes, after he said he had fled Iran to somewhere in Europe.
An Iranian court sentenced the prominent filmmaker to eight years jail on national security charges, and he said Monday he said he “had to choose between prison and leaving Iran” after he learned the prison term would be implemented quickly.
“If geographical Iran suffers beneath the boots of your religious tyranny, cultural Iran is alive in the common minds of millions of Iranians who were forced to leave Iran due to your brutality and no power can impose its will on it. From today, I am a resident of cultural Iran,” he said in an Instagram post that included a video of Iran’s mountainous border..
Some crew members involved in the film’s production, his lawyer Babak Paknia said earlier this month, adding that they were under pressure to have it withdrawn from the festival.
Rasoulof won the Golden Bear, the Berlin Film Festival’s top prize, in 2020 with his anti-capital punishment film There Is No Evil.
He was detained in July 2022 and released the following year after a wave of nationwide protests that began in September subsided.
Appearances at the Cannes Festival have in recent years been increasingly contentious for Iranian directors and actors.
Prominent director Saeed Roustaee was sentenced to six months in prison for the screening of his film Leila’s Brothers at the 2022 festival.
Iranian authorities said at the time it had been shown without authorisation.
The film’s star, Taraneh Alidoosti, was released in early 2023 after almost three weeks in jail over her support for the protest movement that erupted after the death of Mahsa Amini, arrested for allegedly breaking Iran’s strict dress code, in 2022.
Hollywood titans
Francis Ford Coppola will lead a parade of veteran American movie titans to the French Riviera, rubbing shoulders with Star Wars creator George Lucas and Paul Schrader.
Half a century later since their 1970s Cannes’ heyday, Coppola and Schrader will compete head-to-head for the festival’s coveted Palme d’Or with their new films Megalopolis and Oh Canada, while Lucas receives an honorary award for his blockbuster career.
The trio were central figures in a pack of rebellious filmmakers, dubbed the “New Hollywood”, who upended the staid Hollywood studio system at the time.
They borrowed arthouse styles from the previous decade’s French New Wave, along with its idea of the director as a visionary “auteur”.
Coppola’s Megalopolis features Oscar-winning stalwarts Dustin Hoffman and Jon Voight, as well as Laurence Fishburne, who appeared as a young teen in Coppola’s Apocalypse Now which won the Palme d’Or in 1979.
#MeToo
A short film on survivors of sexual abuse directed by Judith Godrèche, a key figure in France’s #MeToo movement, is also set to screen.
Her 17-minute film titled Moi Aussi (Me Too, in French) will show on 15 May during the opening of the Un Certain Regard category.
The 52-year-old spoke up earlier in the year, accusing directors Benoit Jacquot and Jacques Doillon of sexually assaulting her when she was a teenager – allegations both have denied.
She has since made powerful speeches at the Césars, the French equivalent of the Oscars, and in the National Assembly to urge an end to sexual abuse in what she described as an “incestuous” French film industry.
The French parliament has since agreed to create a commission of inquiry to investigate sexual and gender-based violence in cinema and other cultural sectors.
Meanwhile, the French non-profit organisation 50/50 Collective will also be present at the festival with debates and panels on diversity in cinema and preventing sexual harassment on film sets.
