Child stars shine at Cannes
The Cannes Film Festival, with its late-night soirees and throngs of paparazzi, isn’t an ideal place for children. Yet this year, kid actors have delivered many of the festival’s most memorable performances, often by not just equalling their taller co-stars, but by towering above them. It’s the year of les enfants.
That’s perhaps been especially welcome when innocence has been hard to come by, and not just on the screen. Last week’s bombing in Manchester, which took the lives of many young concertgoers, was acutely felt in Cannes. Pervasive security measures were ramped up even more — measures that had been inflated following last year’s deadly rampage in nearby Nice.
It made the smiling young faces of Cannes’ kids shine all the brighter. Meet the Cannes class of 2017:
Maggie Mulubwa
Rungano Nyoni’s I Am Not a Witch was one of the standouts of the festival. But it wouldn’t have worked without Mulubwa’s remarkable lead performance in the surreal, comic, tragic tale of a young African girl who is declared a witch by her village and exiled. While researching in Zambia, location scouts happened to take pictures of Mulubwa playing on the beach. The filmmakers auditioned hundreds of girls before deciding to track down the arresting girl in the photos.
Millicent Simmonds
For the part of Rose, a young deaf girl in 1927 New York, Todd Haynes went searching for a nonprofessional deaf girl who could help carry his period fable Wonderstruck. When he saw Simmonds’ audition tape, he said he “shivered”. Her performance was one of the most acclaimed at the festival. She and her young co-star Jaden Michael made for perhaps the cutest pair in Cannes. Their dancing at the film’s postpremiere party, Haynes said, was “outrageous and adorable”.
Ahn Seo-Hyun
Bong Joon-ho’s fantastical Okja contains some eye-catching characters — Jake Gyllenhaal, Tilda Swinton, a digitally created giant pig. But the 13-year-old South Korean actress Ahn Seo-Hyn, who stars as Mija, may best them all. In a wild romp of a movie, she’s the film’s quiet, melancholic core.
Brooklynn Kimberly Prince and Valeria Cotto
In Sean Baker’s The Florida Project, Prince and Cotto play 6-year-olds living in a Florida motel. Their world, poor and gritty, is a far cry from the nearby Walt Disney World, but no less magical.
Matvey Novikov
Russian director Andrey Zvyagintsev’s Loveless is no picnic. It’s about a bitterly divorcing couple and their missing 12-year-old son, played by Novikov. The scene that precedes the boy’s flight provided one of the most haunting images of the festival.