Iranian film-maker won Cannes film festival’s Palme D’Or prize earlier this year for It Was Just an Accident
Iran has sentenced the Palme d’Or-winning film-maker Jafar Panahi in absentia to one year in prison and a travel ban over “propaganda activities” against the country.
The sentence includes a two-year ban on leaving Iran and prohibition of Panahi from membership of any political or social groups, his lawyer Mostafa Nili said, adding that they would file an appeal.
Continue reading...Chronicle of the Years of Fire took the prize in 1975 for its portrayal of the Algerian war of independence, drawing on his own traumatic history
Mohammed Lakhdar-Hamina, the first Arab and African director to win the coveted Palme d’Or at the Cannes film festival, has died aged 91, his family said Friday.
The film-maker was awarded the prize in 1975 for Chronicle of the Years of Fire, a historical drama about the Algerian war of independence.
Continue reading...The director of It Was Just an Accident was cheered by supporters as he arrived back in his home country, where his work has previously landed him in jail
Iranian film-maker Jafar Panahi was given a hero’s welcome on his return to Tehran on Monday after winning the top prize at the Cannes film festival, footage posted on social media showed.
After being banned from leaving Iran for years, forced to make films underground and enduring spells in prison, Panahi attended the film festival in person and sensationally walked away with the Palme d’Or for his latest movie It Was Just an Accident.
Continue reading...Director says his fifth movie with the actor will probably be their last project together as Washington ‘has been talking about retirement’
The collaboration between Spike Lee and Denzel Washington has spanned four decades and tackled many aspects of African American life. But Lee feels their latest venture, the kidnap drama Highest 2 Lowest, will probably be the duo’s swansong.
“This is the fifth one we’ve done together,” Lee said after the picture’s premiere at the Cannes film festival. “It has been a blessing, this body of work between us, doing films that people love. And I think this is it. He’s been talking about retirement. But five films together: that’s good, they stand up.”
Continue reading...Festival attendee was hospitalised by a falling tree on the celebrated Croisette boulevard
The producers of a Japanese film which screened at the Cannes film festival have called for an investigation and safety review after one of their team was struck and badly injured by a falling palm tree on the famous Croisette boulevard.
The incident occurred on Saturday as the team behind Brand New Landscape, which was selected for the Directors’ Fortnight sidebar, were walking along Cannes’ celebrated seafront road when a three-metre tree fell on to the pavement. Local authorities said a man in his 30s was injured.
Continue reading...Comments at Cannes come after US president’s social media posts against Bruce Springsteen and Taylor Swift
Pedro Pascal has sharply criticised Donald Trump’s attacks against artists, as the director of a conspiracy theory satire starring the actor said he feared the political messages of films could be weaponised by US border guards.
“Fuck the people that try to make you scared,” the Game of Thrones and The Last of Us actor said at a press conference at the Cannes film festival, promoting Ari Aster’s new film Eddington. “And fight back. And don’t let them win.”
Continue reading...Theo Navarro-Mussy has a secondary role as a police officer in the film Dossier 137 by Dominik Moll which is to premiere on Thursday
The Cannes film festival said it had banned an actor in a prominent French film from the red carpet on Thursday because of sexual assault allegations against him.
Theo Navarro-Mussy has a secondary role as a police officer in the film Dossier 137 by Dominik Moll which is to premiere on Thursday in the festival’s main competition. According to French magazine Télérama, which broke the news, Navarro-Mussy was accused of rape by three former partners in 2018, 2019, and 2020, but the case was dropped last month for lack of evidence.
Continue reading...In Cannes to promote his Stalinist drama Two Prosecutors, the film-maker said he feared the US and Russia would soon ‘become equal’
One of Ukraine’s leading film-makers has spoken of the “nightmare” of an emergent alliance between authoritarian leaders in Russia and the US, as his new film on contemporary echoes with the Stalinist era opens at the Cannes film festival.
“The events that unfolded in the past 100 days really surprised many people all over the world,” said director Sergei Loznitsa, whose new film Two Prosecutors received its world premiere on Wednesday. “One couldn’t even imagine in a nightmare such a union, such an understanding between two authoritarian leaders.”
Continue reading...The star, who at 62 performed his own stunts for the forthcoming Final Reckoning, tells Cannes press conference ‘I don’t mind encountering the unknown’
Tom Cruise got stuck on the wing of a biplane shortly before it ran out fuel during the filming of Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning, the director of the eighth instalment of the action franchise has revealed.
Speaking to an audience at the Cannes film festival hours before the film’s premiere, director Christopher McQuarrie recounted the filming of a stunt sequence in which Cruise, in his long-running role as the field agent Ethan Hunt, walked between between the two wings of a biplane as the aircraft was mid-air over South Africa.
Continue reading...Prolific Canadian director also made one of the country’s first internationally successful films, The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz, starring Richard Dreyfuss
Ted Kotcheff, the prolific Canadian director of films including First Blood, Weekend at Bernie’s, Wake in Fright and The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz, has died aged 94. His daughter Kate Kotcheff told the Canadian Press that he had died of heart failure on Thursday in Nuevo Vallarta, Mexico, where he lived. His son Thomas said: “He died of old age, peacefully, and surrounded by loved ones.”
In an amazingly varied career, Kotcheff’s work ranged from hardhitting TV plays and low-budget features in the UK, to hit Hollywood comedies and prestige-laden award-winners and cult films. Kate Kotcheff said: “He was an amazing storyteller. He was an incredible, larger than life character [and] he was a director who could turn his hand to anything.”
Continue reading...The actor, who became the first transgender woman to win the best actress prize at Cannes, had earlier dedicated her award to ‘all the trans people who are suffering’
The first transgender woman to be awarded the best actress prize at the Cannes film festival filed a legal complaint on Wednesday over a “sexist insult” from a far-right politician after her win.
Karla Sofía Gascón and co-stars jointly received the accolade on Saturday for their performances in French auteur Jacques Audiard’s Mexico-set narco musical Emilia Perez.
Continue reading...Ali Abbasi’s film, starring Sebastian Stan, presents a fictionalised account of an incident recorded in Ivana Trump’s 1990 divorce deposition, and since retracted
Donald Trump is depicted as a rapist who assaulted his first wife, Ivana, in a new biopic, The Apprentice, which has its world premiere in competition at this year’s Cannes film festival on Monday. Directed by the Iranian-Danish film-maker Ali Abbasi, the drama provides a fictionalised account of a 1989 incident that was previously detailed in the couple’s divorce proceedings.
The scene, which occurs near the end of The Apprentice, depicts Trump reacting with fury after Ivana disparages his physical appearance. “You have a face like a fucking orange,” she tells him. “You’re getting fat, you’re getting ugly, and you’re getting bald.” The future president is then shown forcing his wife to the floor and raping her. “Did I find your G-spot?” he asks in the film.
Continue reading...Speaking at Cannes, the director says Megalopolis, his reworking of ancient Rome’s Catiline conspiracy, has become ever more prescient
Megalopolis review – Coppola’s passion project is megabloated and megaboring
The US, whose founders tried to emulate the laws and governmental structures of the Roman republic, is headed for a similarly self-inflicted collapse, director Francis Ford Coppola has said at the premiere of his first film in more than a decade.
“What’s happening in America, in our republic, in our democracy, is exactly how Rome lost their republic thousands of years ago,” Coppola told a press conference at the Cannes film festival on Friday. “Our politics has taken us to the point where we might lose our republic.”
Continue reading...Exclusive: The director of The Seed of the Sacred Fig details how he discarded electronic devices and fled over the mountains on foot after authorities sentenced him to eight years in prison and flogging
Iranian director Mohammad Rasoulof escaped imminent imprisonment in Iran by discarding all trackable electronic devices and walking across a mountainous borderland on foot, the film-maker has told the Guardian in an exclusive interview.
But even though he has found shelter in Germany and is optimistic about attending next week’s Cannes premiere of the film that nearly saw him jailed for eight years, Rasoulof said he still expects to return to his home country “quite soon” and sit out his sentence.
Continue reading...Crisis management team reported to be in place as Meryl Streep heads roster of female stars and directors collecting accolades
For good and bad reasons, on and off the red carpet, the spotlight is trained on women in the run-up to the Cannes film festival this week. As the cream of female film talent, including Hollywood’s Meryl Streep and Britain’s Andrea Arnold, prepare to receive significant career awards, a dark cloud is threatening. It is expected that new allegations of the abuse of women in the European entertainment industry will be made public, which may overshadow the sparkle of a feminist Croisette.
Streep’s screen achievements will be celebrated with an honorary Palme d’Or at the opening ceremony, while a day later Arnold, the acclaimed British film director, will receive the prestigious Carosse d’Or from the French director’s guild. And on Sunday another influential British film personality will be saluted when diversity champion Dame Donna Langley, the chairman and chief content officer at NBCUniversal, is to be honoured with the Women in Motion Award at a lavish dinner. All this comes in a year that also sees the American director Greta Gerwig, best known for last summer’s Barbie, presiding over a jury that features the campaigning stars Eva Green and Lily Gladstone. But the story of the 77th festival will not be all positive for women.
Continue reading...Group will protest against government’s treatment of freelance workers at festivals across France
The Cannes film festival is facing strike action as it opens next week and could see protests by projectionists, floor managers and press agents who are demanding changes to the French government’s treatment of seasonal film festival staff.
The festival on France’s Côte d’Azur has faced major strike action only once before, during the student protests and workers’ strikes that began in May 1968.
Continue reading...The film-maker, who won the Palme d’Or for 1977’s Padre Padrone, was a towering presence for more than three decades, creating politically engaged works with his brother Vittorio
The Italian film-maker Paolo Taviani, whose gritty biopic Padre Padrone won top prize at the Cannes film festival, has died aged 92, Rome’s mayor, Roberto Gualtieri, said on Thursday.
For more than three decades Taviani and his brother Vittorio formed one of cinema’s greatest directorial duos. “Paolo Taviani, a great maestro of Italian cinema, leaves us,” Gualtieri said on X. The brothers “directed unforgettable, profound, committed films which entered into the collective imagination and the history of cinema”, Gualtieri added.
Continue reading...Oscar winner urges signing of petition after Iran court finds Saeed Roustaee guilty of ‘contributing to propaganda’ for showing banned movie
Martin Scorsese has backed a petition against the jailing of the prominent Iranian movie director Saeed Roustaee for screening a film at the Cannes film festival.
Scorsese, the Oscar-winning director of Taxi Driver and Goodfellas, reposted a campaign launched by his daughter Francesca this week after news of Roustaee’s prison sentence emerged.
Continue reading...Films in contention for this year’s Palme d’Or include Wes Anderson’s Asteroid City and Jonathan Glazer’s The Zone of Interest, while Johnny Depp’s Louis XV kicks off proceedings
Jury president Ruben Östlund struck a defiant note of optimism on the opening day of the 76th Cannes film festival, positioning the event as a stronghold of community in an increasingly atomised world. Cinema, he said, was more relevant and valuable than ever. The challenge is to connect it with a younger, post-pandemic audience that prefers to gorge its entertainment online.
“If you look at today’s world, you see that cinema is unique for the simple reason that it offers a room where we can all watch films together,” he said. “All the other content, we’re accessing it on our devices, in our little bubbles, consuming culture like zombies and not reflecting what we’re looking at. So going to the cinema is almost a political stance. We come together and have a conversation about the world. We find out who we are and where we’re going. That is cinema’s strongest selling point. I think people want that collective experience.”
Continue reading...Prestige slot for Jeanne de Barry, featuring Depp as Louis XV, has drawn criticism but general delegate Thierry Frémaux says it is not ‘a controversial choice’
Cannes film festival general delegate Thierry Frémaux has defended the decision to hand the prestigious opening slot to Jeanne du Barry, in which Depp stars as Louis XV.
Directed by and starring Maïwenn, Jeanne du Barry is a biopic of the famous 18th-century maîtresse-en-titre, who was executed in 1793 during the French revolution. Speaking to Variety, Frémaux said it was not “a controversial choice”, adding: “If Johnny Depp had been banned from working it would have been different, but that’s not the case. We only know one thing, it’s the justice system and I think he won the legal case.”
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