Festivals

In 1983, Mel Gibson and Sigourney Weaver made the pilgrimage to the Croisette to support Peter Weir's The Year of Living Dangerously. The drama, set in mid-60s Indonesia, a country in a political crisis that would soon overthrow president Sukarno.

When Thierry Frémaux recently spoke to HFPA journalists, he touched on a wide range of subjects, from cinema to his twin lifelong passion for Judo and cycling.   Especially close to his heart are the two festivals he directs: the Lumière Film Festival, devoted to classic and restored films, which is held in Lyon each October, and of course the Cannes Film festival.

As the 74th edition of the Cannes Film Festival gets underway, the view is very different from all the decades when the hustle and bustle started at least a week before the opening. It is truly a new era, a not quite post-pandemic one.

The Cannes Film Festival may have moved from its pre-COVID May dates and will instead take place in person from July 6-17, but the return to tradition was apparent when festival president Pierre Lescure and director Thierry Fremaux announced the line-up of 63 films from the Normandie Theater in Paris with the poignant opening statement: “Cinema is not dead”. A French-made (albeit English-language) film will open the 74th annual edition on July 6 at the Palais du Festival.

Nanfu Wang’s gripping new documentary In the Same Breath, which premiered at the 2021 Sundance Film Festival, opens on the 2019 New Year’s Eve in Wuhan, China, site of the first cases of the novel coronavirus. It may be an interesting (and fateful) coincidence that the filmmaker was a Sundance Film Festival juror in Park City on January 23, 2020, the same day Wuhan went into lockdown during the first COVID-19 outbreak.

Lucy Walker’s Bring Your Own Brigade isn't the first documentary about the devastation wrought by uncontrolled wildfires that destroyed Paradise, California. In 2020, director Ron Howard’s Rebuilding Paradise also played at the Sundance Film Festival.

Selected as one of Variety’s 10 Directors to watch, Lyle Mitchell Corbine Jr. brings his quiet and confident film Wild Indian to the Sundance Film Festival.

With the mainstreaming of nonfiction narratives and the expansion in streaming platform options, the last two decades or so have seen an explosion in documentaries chronicling precocious overachievers, from Jeffrey Blitz’s Oscar-nominated Spellbound all the way up to and including several new offerings at this year’s Sundance Film Festival. Cusp, on the other hand, co-directed by Parker Hill and Isabel Bethencourt, is an arresting work of underclass portraiture that exists on the opposite end of this adolescent spectrum, centering not on honor roll students but rather on kids with a certain amount of trauma and an even greater amount of uncertainty about what their futures could or should hold.

A world premiere at the Sundance Film Festival, where it was the recipient of the U. S.