From Park Chan-Wook to Claire Denis, from David Cronenberg to Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne, here are the 21 films in competition for the Palme d’Or at the 75th Cannes Film Festival, which will be held from May 17 to 28.
The director of “Crash” (1996) is not used to sparing his audience: at 79, the Canadian should prove it once again, with this film which is about transhumanism and the ablation of organs with Viggo Mortensen and Léa Seydoux.
Revealed in “Un Certain Regard” in 2018 with “Border”, the Dane of Iranian origin follows a journalist from Tehran investigating a series of feminicides. These crimes would be the work of a man who claims to purify the city of its sins.
The most gritty of Swedish directors is seeking a second Palme d’Or, after “The Square” (2017), with this satirical comedy where he follows the passengers of a luxury cruise, stranded on a desert island and led by a captain of Marxist ship.
After his Palme d’Or for “A family affair” (2018), the great regular on the Croisette took a side step towards South Korea, embarking the star of “Parasite”, Song Kang-ho, for a new story of families, which is about baby boxes.
He marked the Croisette with the ultra-violent “Old boy” (Grand Prix 2004); the Korean Park Chan-Wook should again intrigue with an investigator who must elucidate the murder of a man, with the main suspect: the wife of the victim.
A great figure in independent cinema, the American in minimalist cinema (“First Cow”) finds one of her favorite actresses, Michelle Williams, for a film about the daily life of an artist and the way she draws inspiration from her life. .
After the success of “Confidential Cairo” (2017), the Swede of Egyptian origin Tarik Saleh reconnects with his favorite actor, Fares Fares, and films a power struggle between the country’s religious and political elites.
The terrible child of the Russian scene, settled in Berlin after leaving Russia in the wake of the invasion of Ukraine, is in competition for the third time, with a historical film about the private life of the composer Tchaikovsky.
The Franco-Italian actress who went on to direct successfully is one of the five women vying for the Palme d’Or. His film on the theater school of Amandiers, founded by the French director Patrice Chéreau in the Paris region, has as its backdrop the raging AIDS.
The Dardenne brothers, the most famous representatives of social cinema, already twice palmed in Cannes, this time content the friendship of two African teenagers exiled in Belgium and living in precarious conditions.
After “Ad Astra”, the American director returned to Earth with a chronicle of adolescence carried by Anne Hathaway and Anthony Hopkins and located in the heart of New York in the 1980s, in a school governed by the father of Donald Trump.
For his first steps in competition, the Neapolitan Mario Martone pays homage to his city through a dramatic adaptation of the novel “Nostalgia” by the Italian writer and journalist Ermanno Rea.
Rewarded in February for “Avec amour et acharnement” at the Berlinale, the French director Claire Denis returns with a “film of expectation, atmosphere, on the edge of the diplomatic thriller” according to the general delegate of the Cannes Film Festival Thierry Frémaux, shot in Central America.
His first film “Girl” on transidentity won him the Camera d’or in 2018. With “Close”, the Belgian Lukas Dhont deals with friendship through two teenagers separated by a tragedy.
Continuing from his “Christmas Tale” (2008), French director Arnaud Desplechin films a family drama with a long-term conflicted brother and sister reunited by the deaths of their parents. With Marion Cotillard and Melvil Poupaud.
Palme d’Or for “4 months, 3 weeks, 2 days”, drama on abortion and corruption, Cristian Mungiu continues to examine the ills of Romania with a film, shot in a village in Transylvania, evoking the effect of European policies, relations between communities and the destiny of a country.
Iranian Saeed Roustaee has already impressed with his punchy thriller, “The Law of Tehran”, on drug trafficking. He arrives in Cannes with “Leila’s Brothers”, about a young woman whose family is riddled with debts, who tries to start a family business.
At 84, this great name in Polish cinema, pillar of the new wave in this country in the 1960s, returned to Poland after living in California, tells the story of a donkey rejected from a Polish circus to a stable. of horses, before being driven to the Alps through numerous adventures.
The Spaniard Albert Serra, who filmed “The Death of Louis XIV” in 2016 with Jean-Pierre Léaud in the role of the dying sovereign, settled in Tahiti for this story of love and writing, with Benoît Magimel as a French diplomat.
Third Frenchwoman in competition, Léonor Serraille, noticed in 2017 with “Jeune fille”, tells the story of a family of immigrant origin, from the end of the 1980s to the present day in the Parisian suburbs.
Actress Charlotte Vandermeersch adapts, with the director of “The Merditude of Things” and “Alabama Monroe” the novel by Italian Paolo Cognetti, on the bond of friendship between Pietro and Bruno, a boy from the city and another of the mountain.
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