The 2011 Cannes Film Festival runs from May 11th to 22nd. This year, American actor, director and producer Robert De Niro is the President of the Jury of the 64th Festival. The co-founder of the Tribeca Film Festival, celebrating its 10th anniversary in 2011, has the (probably unenviable) task of overseeing the choice of who will win that coveted Palme d’Or.
The Feature Films Jury is a star-studded cast in itself. Led by Robert de Niro, the jury includes Argentinian Martina Gusman, actress and producer; Nansun Shi, producer from Hong Kong; the actress, scriptwriter and producer Uma Thurman representing the U.S.A., Linn Ullmann, writer, journalist and literary critic from Norway; French director ; the U.K.’s actor and producer Jude Law, Mahamat-Saleh Harooun, director from Chad and finally Johnnie To, director and producer in Hong Kong.
19 films are in contention. The biggest names in 2011 are Terrence Malick, with his long-awaited Tree of Life (which had its world premiere in Britain on May 3); Pedro Almodovar, with The Skin I Live In; Lars von Trier’s new entry Melancholia; two-time Palme d’Or winners the Dardenne brothers with Boy With A Bike; and Paolo Sorrentino’s This Must be the Place.
Among the others in the running are Scottish director Lynne Ramsay, the only British film-maker with We Need To Talk About Kevin, adapted from Lionel Shriver’s best-selling novel; Nuri Bilge Ceylan from Turkey with Once Upon A Time in Anatolia; Finland’s Aki Kaurismaki with Le Havre; Takashi Miike from Japan, with Hara-Kiri: Death of a Samurai; and Australian Julia Leigh’s debut film from her own novel, Sleeping Beauty. Described as ‘a haunting erotic fairytale’, it should do well at the box office at least.
Highlights of the 2011 Festival
Woody Allen’s new film, Midnight in Paris opens the Festival on May 11th, at the same time as appearing in cinemas all over France. Starting the likes of Owen Wilson, Rachel McAdams and Marion Cotillard, as well as Kathy Bates, Adrien Brody, Carla Bruni-Sarkozy, Gad Elmaleh and Léa Seydoux. Woody Allen has already filmed London (Match Point) and Barcelona (Vicky Cristina Barcelona). No wonder the French are excited; it’s the turn of Paris now, and of France’s first lady, Carla-Bruni-Sarkozy, to make her mark.Though it's doubtful if either Sarkozy or his missus will be there. She was not a natural it seems, and one of the major films at the Festival, La Conquete (The Conquest) is a bio-pic pulling no punches about the French President's rise to power.On the opening night there’s a special award, an Honorary Palme d’Or, the first time it’s been given. Directors have been acknowledged in the past for their outstanding contribution – Woody Allen in 2002 and Clint Eastwood in 2009, but neIther of these particular icons were given a Palme d’Or. On May 11th, Italian director Bernardo Bertolucci will step up for the considerable honor.
Cinema de la Plage
At the delightful Cinema de la Plage on the beach at Cannes, the public gets the chance to see some of the films being shown in the Cannes Classics and Out of Competition sections. So if you’re lucky enough to be in Cannes during the Festival, go to the Cannes Tourism Office for the schedule of what’s on show. The possibilities this year include A Trip to the Moon (Le Voyage dans la lune) by Georges Méliès (France, 1902); The Machine to Kill Bad People (La Macchina Ammazzacattivi) by Roberto Rossellini (Italy, 1952); A Bronx Tale by Robert De Niro (USA, 1993) and The Conformist (Il Conformista) by Bernardo Bertolucci (Italy, 1970). Other classics include Puzzle of a Downfall Child by Jerry Schatzberg (USA, 1970); The Children of Paradise (Les Enfants du paradis) by Marcel Carné (France, 1945), and Despair by Rainer Werner Fassbinder (Germany, 1978).
The Out of Competition Section includes the film that will embarrass the French President no doubt, La Conquete (The Conquest) by Xavier Durringer; Jodi Foster’s The Beaver and Jeffrey Zimbalist’s Bollywood – The Greatest Love Story Ever Told.
The Festival closes with Les Bien-Aimes (The Beloved) by Christophe Honore, starring the stunning Catherine Deneuve.
