CANNES CRITICS’ WEEK LINEUP
Hollywood star Paul Dano’s much-anticipated directorial debut, Wildlife, will open Critics’ Week at the Cannes film festival next month, the organizers said on Monday.
The film by the There Will Be Blood and Little Miss Sunshine actor features his friend Jake Gyllenhaal, who played opposite Dano in the Oscar-nominated
Prisoners in 2013. The film is based on a Richard Ford novel about a teenager watching his parents’ marriage fall apart.
Critics’ Week director Charles Tesson said it includes an “extremely impressive” performance from British actress Carey Mulligan, who was nominated for an Oscar for her performance in An Education, the coming-of-age drama based on journalist Lynn Barber’s bestselling memoir.
“Paul Dano shows himself to be a true cineaste in his first feature film,” Tesson told AFP, “a profoundly human portrait at the disintegration of an American family... done with elegant classicism.”
The parallel event for first- and second-time directors, which
starts on May 9, the day after the main Cannes festival, also features a parody of the life of a superstar soccer player not unlike Cristiano Ronaldo called Diamantino.
Although its Portugese-American co-director Gabriel Abrantes has said that the film is “not really about” the Real Madrid star, Tesson said the “delightful off-the-wall” comedy would ring bells with soccer fans.
Unlike the main festival, which has been criticized for its dearth of female talent, Critics’ Week is dominated by films by and about women.
While only three of the 18 films competing for the top Palme d’Or prize are by women, they make up the majority in the Critics’ Week competition.
Indian director Rohena Gera turns the romantic comedy on its head in her first feature, Sir, Tesson said, a master-servant love story that shakes class and caste taboos starring rising Bollywood actress Tillotama Shome.
One Day by the Hungarian Zsofia Szilagyi follows the manic day of an overstretched working mother trying to hold her own and her family’s life together, while Woman at War is the “funny and stirring” story of an Icelandic environmental activist.
Young documentary-maker Anja Kofmel investigates the murder of her cousin, a journalist who was killed during the wars in the former Yugoslavia, in her film, Chris the Swiss, which is partly animated. The world’s biggest film festival
runs from May 8 to 19.