Stars, film professionals and journalists have descended en masse to the South of France as Cannes Film Festival opens its 70th edition tonight. Still the world's most influential cinema event despite the shifting landscape brought by streaming services and the rise of TV, Cannes is steadfast in its mission to celebrate world cinema with its programme of established auteurs, as well as discoveries. That, and then the celebrity pages online and in print, will have a busy period as stars and film personalities walk the famous Cannes red carpet during the next 10 days.
The top-tier competition section this year has 19 films. The Palme d'Or will be decided by the jury led by Spanish director Pedro Almodóvar. This year there's no Thai film in the official selection and there's only one Southeast Asian title, Indonesian drama Marlina The Murderer In Four Acts, screened in the sidebar Directors' Fortnight. Still, there are Southeast Asian angles in the festival that will shape the discussion of world movies in the next 12 months.
The auteurs
The 70th Cannes Film Festival will see a number of its past alumni. Todd Haynes (Carol, 2015) returns with what looks like a gorgeous period drama, Wonderstruck, starring Julianne Moore. European master Michael Haneke (Amour, Cache) is back with Happy End, the detail of which is a guarded secret. Sofia Coppola will premiere The Beguiled, set in a girl's school during the Civil War (starring Elle Fanning and Nicole Kidman).
From Asia, Japanese director Naomi Kawase returns with Hikari (Radiance), then you have the Korea auteur Hong Sang-soo who has two films in the official selection: Geu-hu (The Day After) in the competition and La Caméra De Claire (Claire's Camera) in the Special Screening, both reprising the director's familiar trope of awkward relationships.
Thai and Southeast Asian angles
The Beguiled by Sofia Coppola. Festival de Cannes
There's no Thai film, but there's a French production shot in Thailand: A Prayer Before Dawn, based-on-a-true-story account of a British convict in a Thai prison. What looks like a film that will inspire extensive debate, however, is Le Vénérable W., a documentary on the Myanmar firebrand monk Ashin Wirathu. The director is Barbet Schroeder, a respected veteran who also made films about Idi Amin and other historical figures. This is the one to look forward to.
The Asian
Korea and Japan have had a good year, a mark of the two countries' enviable status in world cinema. Korea, especially, is robust with five new films in the Official Selection: Bong Joon-ho's supernatural thriller Okja and Hong Sang-soo's drama Geu-hu, both in the competition; Bulhandang (The Merciless) and The Villain in the Special Screening (remember that the zombie hit Busanhaeng (Train To Busan) premiered at Cannes last year), as well as La Caméra De Claire, starring Kim Min-hee and Isabelle Huppert.
From Japan, the three films are from the familiar names: Naomi Kawase with Hikari; Takashi Miike, the maestro of exhilarating mash-up, will present Mugen No jûnin (Blade Of The Immortal), about an immortal samurai; and Kiyoshi Kurosawa is back with Sanpo Suru Shinryakusha (Before We Vanish), about three aliens in human disguise, showing in the sidebar Un Certain Regard.
The "TV" surge
The hot talking point in the week leading up to the festival is the inclusion of "TV movies" in the Official Selection, something Cannes kept refusing to do over the past years. The loudest controversy -- or the radical decision -- concerns Okja by Bong Joon-ho (starring Tilda Swinton) and The Meyerowitz Stories (with Adam Sandler and Ben Stiller) by Noah Baumbach, two films produced by Netflix and destined for the subscribers of the streaming service, bypassing traditional cinematic release. The last bit prompted a protest by French cinema operators and Cannes felt compelled to change its rules: since 2018, every film in the competition will have to commit to cinematic release.
So the debate on how we might consume cinema in the near future is thrown right on the red carpet of Cannes, the temple of cinema as we know it.
The festival will also screen two more made-for-television titles: David Lynch's much-anticipated Twin Peaks reboot (two episodes will be screened) and Jane Campion's sequel to her much acclaimed Top Of The Lake, a detective story set in New Zealand.
Both are directors celebrated for their careers in making film.
The VR
Also a non-cinema inclusion, Cannes for the first time will present an experimental virtual reality experience called Carne Y Arena (Virtually Present, Physically Invisible), created by Alejandro González Iñárritu (Cannes alumni and Oscar winner from The Revenant) and his director of photography Emmanuel Lubezki (a hat-trick of Oscars from Gravity, Birdman and The Revenant). It's proof that Cannes, the grand dame of cinema, wants to move forward even when it has turned 70.
