Race for top prize
> Here are the 18 films in the running for the Palme d’Or at the 71st Cannes film festival, which takes place from May 8-19
FROM an AfricanAmerican detective infiltrating the Ku Klux Klan, to Kurdish female fighters battling jihadists, here are the movies competing for the top Palme d’Or prize at next month’s Cannes film festival:
Everybody Knows Iranian master Asghar Farhadi will kick off the festival with a psychological thriller about a family reunion going awry, starring Penelope Cruz and Javier Bardem.
While Farhadi, 45, won an Oscar and the Golden Bear at Berlin for his 2011 breakthrough film, A Separation, he is yet to take home the coveted French prize.
BlacKkKlansman US director and activist Spike Lee’s drama is based on the reallife story of an African-American police officer who infiltrated the Ku Klux Klan in 1978. The film will open in the US on the first anniversary of a white supremacist march in Charlottesville where an antiracism activist was killed.
At War As France grapples with mass strikes, French director Stephane Brize’s gritty drama about factory workers battling to keep their jobs may hit a timely nerve.
Dogman Italian director Matteo Garrone’s new work is not for the faint- hearted. Dubbed an “urban Western”, the film is inspired by the gruesome murder by dog groomer and cocaine addict Pietro De Negri in the late 1980s.
Under the Silver Lake Four years after giving Cannes audiences nightmares with his thriller It Follows, David Robert Mitchell returns with another spine-chiller, this time about the mysterious murder of a billionaire.
Three Faces Little is known about this portrait of three women by the Iranian dissident Jafar Panahi, who is banned from travel by Tehran. The festival has pleaded with the authorities to let the director, who has faced years of harassment and arrest, to fly to Cannes to show his film.
Leto Russia’s Kirill Serebrennikov is another director who may not be able to present his work at Cannes. Under house arrest over allegations of embezzlement, his film focuses on Soviet rock star Viktor Tsoi and the birth of Russian underground music in the 1980s.
Cold War Amazon Studios is pinning its hopes on this period romance from Oscar-winning PolishBritish director Pawel Pawlikowski, set in Eastern Europe in the 1950s.
Le Livre d’image Little has been revealed about this new film by French-Swiss legend Jean-Luc Godard other than this enigmatic synopsis: “Nothing but silence, nothing but a revolutionary song, a story in five chapters like the five fingers of a hand.”
Asako 1 & 2 In this Japanese drama by Ryusuke Hamaguchi, a young woman meets her first love in Osaka. When he disappears without a trace, she moves on – until his perfect double shows up two years later.
Les Filles du Soleil Kurdish women fighters stand at the centre of French actordirector Eva Husson’s new film. Iranian star Golshifteh Farahani plays Bahar, the leader of the Yazidi Sun Brigade battling jihadists.
Shoplifters Japanese master Hirokazu Koreeda, a longtime sweetheart of the Cannes jury, returns with a tale of a family of small-time crooks who take in a child they find on the street.
Yomeddine A Coptic leper and his orphaned apprentice leave the confines of their colony for the first time and embark on a journey across Egypt to search for what is left of their families.
Lazzaro Felice Rising star Italian director Alice Rohrwacher, already a prize winner at Cannes, is back with a time-travelling story which takes in the fascist 1930s.
Sorry Angel The new film by Christophe Honore, the man behind the charming French musical Love Songs, is a gay love story when the AIDS epidemic was at its height. – AFP Relaxnews