Cannes Film Festival
The 67th edition of the Cannes Film Festival has started on the French Riviera, its line-up also featuring Romanian productions.
Valentin Țigău, 15.05.2014, 12:40
Grace of Monaco, starring Nicole Kidman, opened the 67th Cannes Film Festival on Wednesday night. Screened outside the official competition, the film has been criticised by Princess Grace’s heirs for its historical inaccuracies. The film is about the crisis faced by a married couple at the beginning of the 1960s against the background of a political dispute between France and Monaco and insists on Grace’s role in the conflict between general Charles de Gaulle and Prince Rainier III.
Another controversial production shown in the festival is Welcome to New York, featuring Gerard Depardieu, a film inspired by the sex scandal involving the former IMF head Dominique Strass Kahn.
This year, a number of films from Belgium, Russia, the US, Britain, Turkey, Japan and Mauritania are competing for the Palme d’Or Trophy. Big stars such as Catherine Deneuve, Tommy Lee Jones, Guillaume Canet and Marion Cotillard are expected in Cannes, as well as thousands of film experts and journalists. According to France Presse, this year’s festival is one of excess.
No less than 1,700 titles are screened for the 12-day duration of the festival, of which only 18 are part of the main competition. Other sections include La Quinzaine de Realisateurs (Directors’ Fortnight), La Semaine de la Critique (The International Critics’ Week) and Un Certain Regard (A Particular Outlook). The last in this list, which is dedicated to young talent, also features a Romanian short film by Radu Jude entitled It Can Pass Through the Wall.
The neighbouring Republic of Moldova is represented in Cannes by Dumitru Grossei. His short film, The Gift, which was shot in Romania, is screened on the 18th of May.
The Romanian Cinemateque in Bucharest is this week screening a number of films about European avant-garde cinema made between 1919 and 1939. The focus of the event is the work of the Romanian-born French film maker Isidore Isou, the founder of Lettrism. Isou was at Cannes in 1951 with an experimental film that went on to win the public’s award for avant-garde.
Romania’s greatest success in Cannes was in 2007, when the director and script writer Cristian Mungiu received the Palme d’Or Trophy for his film 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days.
