Cannes unveils 2018 lineup
Canada unrepresented at festival for a second consecutive year
The Cannes Film Festival has announced its lineup for 2018, with new films from Spike Lee, David Robert Mitchell and 87-year-old Jean-Luc Godard hitting the Croisette, along with the previously announced Solo: A Star Wars Story, which will screen out of competition.
Lee will bring BlacKk Klansman, the true story of an African-American police officer who infiltrated the KuKlux Klan. Mitchell, who made the 2014 horror It Follows, has a crime thriller called Under the Silver Lake, about a man who becomes obsessed with a woman’s mysterious disappearance.
And it’s anyone’s guess what Godard will unveil with his 44th feature, The Image Book. The “long synopsis” at the film’s website says, sans punctuation: “nothing but silence nothing but a revolutionary song a story in five chapters like the five fingers of a hand.”
Other filmmakers in competition for the Palme d’Or include Italy’s Matteo Garrone (Gomorrah), Polish-born Pawel Pawlikowski (Ida) and Japanese filmmaker Hirokazu Kore-eda (After the Storm).
But 2018 may be notable for its absences at the festival. For the second straight year there are no Canadians among the competition films — Cannes regular Xavier Dolan has said his newest, The Death and Life of John F. Donovan, won’t be ready in time.
Dolan had also flirted with turning his back on Cannes after the media there savaged his last film, It’s Only the End of the World.
Also missing will be any films from streaming giant Netflix, which made enemies among Cannes organizers last year for refusing to release its competition films Okja and The Meyerowitz Stories in theatres.
Rather than bend to the festival’s will, Netflix this year has announced it will not participate, which means a new Orson Welles documentary, a restored version of Welles’ unfinished film The Other Side of the Wind, and new movies from Paul Greengrass and Alfonso Cuarón will find other places to première.
Female directors are also underrepresented for the 71st time in the festival’s 71-year history. This year, only three of the 17 competition films are directed by women: Nadine Labaki of Lebanon, France’s Eva Husson and Italy’s Alice Rohrwacher.
That’s the same number as last year and the year before. The highwater mark for women directors at Cannes was in 2011. There were four.
The Cannes Film Festival runs from May 8 to 19.