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http://blogs.guardian.co.uk/film/2007/05/cannes_deal_of_the_day_michael.html

Cannes deal of the day: Michael Haneke's The White Ribbon

The Austrian director's Hollywood update of Funny Games didn't make it to the festival, but a planned costume drama is stirring up interest.

Geoffrey Macnab

May 18, 2007

Hidden talent... Michael Haneke at Cannes in 2005. Photograph Michel Euler/AP



One film that didn't make it to Cannes this year was Michael Haneke's English language US remake of Funny Games.

Haneke decided not to bring it here on the grounds that the original was in competition in 1997 and it didn't make sense to show Funny Games at the same festival twice. After all, Haneke's new film promises to be a near carbon copy of its predecessor. He had wanted to shoot the 1997 film in the US but wasn't, at that stage, a big enough name to make such a project viable.

Apparently, the shot-by-shot remake is 20 seconds shorter than the first film. It has also taken note of technological changes in the last decade. Characters now use mobile phones. Instead of videos being rewound, there are DVDs. Otherwise, it is the same grim and relentless story about a family on holiday being terrorised.

The advance word is that Naomi Watts and Michael Pitt give exceptional performances. The film is likely to surface in Venice or Toronto in the early autumn. It will doubtless provoke another ferocious debate about the media, violence and voyeurism. Meanwhile, the distributors will be marketing it as a smart, offbeat thriller that the kids will enjoy just as much as the critics.

Intriguingly, here in Cannes, details are also beginning to emerge of Haneke's next project - a rare foray into costume drama. In early 2008, he is due to begin work on what sounds like a historical, Heimat-like epic called The White Ribbon. This will be set during the death throes of the Austro-Hungarian empire. Jean-Claude Carriere (the revered screenwriter known for his work with directors like Luis Bunuel, Milos Forman and Nagisa Oshima) has been helping trim the screenplay. The producer is Margaret Menegoz (who works regularly with Eric Rohmer.)

A few years ago, Haneke films were loved by critics and cherished by a small section of the arthouse audience, but since Hidden, the Austrian has undergone an unlikely transformation. He is now considered a box-office draw. It can be safely guaranteed that as more details of The White Ribbon emerge, the world's distributors will all swoop en masse.

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http://film.guardian.co.uk/cannes2007/story/0,,2084568,00.html

Grenade attack caught on film

Xan Brooks
Monday May 21, 2007
Guardian Unlimited



Samira Makhmalbaf during her first visit to Cannes in 2000, when she was the youngest ever director in competition for the Palme d'Or. Photograph: Michael Euler/AP
 


Samira Makhmalbaf is something of a Cannes darling. She was the youngest director to compete for the Palme d'Or with The Apple, made at the tender age of 18, and won the jury prize for her follow-up films, Blackboards and At Five in the Afternoon. But on this occasion the Iranian film-maker is here to screen a far less edifying spectacle: a seven-minute virtual snuff movie that shows the bombing that wrecked her recent project.

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Earlier this year, Makhmalbaf was in northern Afghanistan shooting Two-Legged Horse, based on a script by her father Mohsen. On March 27, a man who had infiltrated the set as an extra tossed a hand grenade from the rooftop at a local bazaar, severely injuring six people and killing the horse that took the brunt of the blast. We watch the footage, hear the rip of the grenade and see the animal buckle and collapse. "I saw little boys falling to the ground and the whole street was full of blood," Makhmalbaf recalls. "My first thought was that I wouldn't see my father anymore."

Mohsen Makhmalbaf joins her at the table. One suspects that he was the flashpoint for this latest attack, and one suspects he knows it too. Mohsen was the victim of two failed assassination attempts while shooting his anti-Taliban drama Kandahar in 2001 and has already fallen foul of the Iranian authorities. A pariah in his homeland, he now lives in self-imposed exile in France.

Both father and daughter insist that Two-Legged Horse will eventually be completed. But first they need to find a new, hopefully safer location and convince the cast and crew to work with them again. "I understand if they don't want to," Mohsen admits. "People are in hospital because someone doesn't like me. Shame on me."

Meanwhile, the questions remain. While US forces apprehended the bomber, no group has yet come forward to claim responsibility. Mohsen acknowledges that it could have been al-Qaida or it could have been the Taliban, who still hate him for making Kandahar. Even so, he has his doubts. "I have to be careful answering this because Samira is still living in Iran. But I have some reason to think the bomber came from there. The new situation in Iranian politics doesn't like me, doesn't like many things." He shrugs. "Please remember that this is only my theory, my opinion. But if you hear that Mohsen is killed, that Mohsen is dead, you will know it was Iran that did it."

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http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/22/movies/22cann.html?_r=1&oref=slogin

Cannes Journal

Alienated Europeans, Through a Cold Lens

By A. O. SCOTT and MANOHLA DARGIS

Published: May 22, 2007

A scene from “Import/Export,” left, by the Austrian director Ulrich Seidl.



CANNES, France, May 21 — One of the most fertile subjects of contemporary European cinema is the desolation of contemporary European life. The extravagance and high spirits outside the Cannes screening rooms thus frequently stand in jarring contrast to the misery displayed within them, where stories of privation, disconnection and violence hold up a corrective mirror to a continent that likes to present itself to the rest of the world as prosperous, unified and at peace.

A particular theme within some of these stories is the harshness of existence in Europe’s formerly Communist nations. “Import/Export,” a disturbing and sometimes brilliant new film by the Austrian director Ulrich Seidl, is set partly in Ukraine, depicted as a place where dirty snow swirls around crumbling Soviet-era housing projects. Not that Vienna, the movie’s other main locale, looks much better. In its own way, this Western capital seems like an equally cold and brutal environment.

“Import/Export,” already one of the more controversial entries in this year’s competition, follows two principal characters, both plucked from the masses of ordinary, alienated, easily ignored Europeans. Their paths never cross, but Mr. Seidl gives their experiences a rough symmetry by subtly juxtaposing shots, scenes and situations so that they seem to rhyme.

Olga is a Ukrainian nurse who emigrates to Vienna, where she finds work as a maid and then as a hospital cleaner. Paul is a vaguely thuggish young Austrian, in debt and at loose ends, who travels with his cretinous stepfather to Ukraine to deliver candy machines and used video games. As they pull into one particularly squalid neighborhood, Paul looks through the windshield and says, “Nobody here is ever going to buy a gumball.”

The anxious chuckle that line elicits is characteristic of the film’s grim comedy. Its relentless depiction of social and individual failure, however, is hardly mitigated by moments of absurdist humor, nor by an occasional flicker of human kindness. Mr. Seidl’s long, static takes and Edward Lachman’s pitilessly illuminating cinematography make banal circumstances seem terrifying and strange. And some of the director’s methods are ethically troubling, even as they are also undeniably effective.

One hallmark of recent Austrian cinema has been the blending of documentary and fictional techniques, and here a made-up story is told using mostly nonprofessional actors (including Ekaterina Rak, who plays Olga, and Paul Hofmann, who plays Paul) and very real settings. Among these are a Ukrainian pornography “studio,” where naked women contort their bodies in front of Web cams, as their online Western clients bark instructions in German, and a geriatric hospital where patients, some in advanced states of dementia and debility, lie in their beds, muttering and moaning.

While “Import/Export” is not polemical, it makes the implicit argument that consumer capitalism, among other forces, has pushed the less privileged citizens of Europe — especially in the East — into a state of abjection. But in making this point so powerfully, Mr. Seidl walks right up to, and perhaps crosses, the boundary between exposing the degradation of human dignity and participating in it.

This is especially true in some scenes near the end, in which the film risks becoming as cruel as its chosen milieu. It was very hard to watch, but I have the feeling I will need to see it again.

Agony and Adolescence

With “Paranoid Park,” an intimate character study of an accidental killer, Gus Van Sant has returned to Cannes with one of the most moving and delicately felt films of his fascinating career. (He won the Palme d’Or in 2003 for “Elephant.”) Shot by the cinematographers Christopher Doyle and Rain Kathy Li with an acute sensitivity to color as an index of feeling and mood, the film unwinds as a series of nonlinear flashbacks, some of which repeat like the refrain of a song. Though based on Blake Nelson’s young-adult novel of the same title, Mr. Van Sant’s film — he wrote the lean screenplay, as well as directed and edited — is a work of art that exploits the plasticity of his own medium to eerie, at times rapturous effect.

The angel-faced Gabe Nevins plays Alex, a high school student who spends much of his out-of-class time skateboarding with his friends and fending off a girl who is eager to lose her virginity. One evening while visiting Paranoid Park, a swooping concrete paradise for throwaways and runaways, buzzing with the sounds of grinding wheels and excited young voices, Alex inadvertently causes the gruesome death of a security guard. Mr. Van Sant tells what happened to the teenager, still more boy than man, not a hint of down on his chin, as if he were building a mosaic. Each new fragment adds another piece to the whole, which doesn’t fully come into view until late in this precisely shaped one-hour-25-minute story.

The film’s visual beauty is so striking — in one shot Alex skateboards against a midnight-blue light, framed by glossy green shrubbery — that it takes a while to appreciate that the images are doing most of the narrative work. You see Alex writing in a notebook and hear him in intermittent voice-over, but the turmoil and confusion churning in his head, as well as the film’s persuasively argued plea for this boy’s fundamental purity, are conveyed through everyday, incidental moments and gestures. Already locked inside the agonizing near-solitude that often haunts adolescence, Alex suffers and worries and exists alone, a state of being that Mr. Van Sant conveys with enormous empathy.

“Paranoid Park” is playing in the main competition and, at press time, does not have an American distributor. Given Mr. Van Sant’s reputation, there’s a good chance that a small company will pick it up, though it’s hard to imagine anyone taking the plunge with the equally radical and austere “Silent Light,” the stunning new film from the Mexican writer and director Carlos Reygadas, which is also in competition.

Mr. Reygadas, last here with his self-conscious affront, “Battle in Heaven,” takes us into an astonishingly alien and beautiful world of Mennonites living in northern Mexico isolation. A story about grace and the fallen world, “Silent Light” owes a strong debt to the Danish master Carl Dreyer, even as it offers continued evidence of Mr. Reygadas’s own intense, individual artistry. I’ll have more to say about this film later in the week.


MANOHLA DARGIS

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http://www.bfi.org.uk/sightandsound/feature/49376

Radical Chic

As the Cannes film festival readies its 60th edition,
few will ponder its hidden tradition as a lightning rod for radicalism.
But Cannes has always been a political affair.
By Chris Darke

The Festival International du Film de Cannes has weathered a fair few storms over its 60-year history, frequently serving as a lightning rod for expressions of political and aesthetic radicalism. It's hardly surprising, given the platform such a prestigious and well-reported event can offer agitators and provocateurs alike. From Jean-Luc Godard to Michael Moore, Guy Debord to Lars von Trier, the festival has provided the plushest soapbox imaginable. But Cannes was political from the outset, conceived in the pre-war years as a counterweight to the Venice film festival, which under Mussolini was fast becoming a stage for fascistic tub-thumping. Here are four snapshots of some of the flashpoint moments in the festival's history.

1. Sky writing

Thanks to its location on the Côte d'Azur Cannes was able to capitalise on a regional association with the artistic avant-garde that reached back to the 19th century and included such figures as Renoir, Monet, Cocteau and Picasso. Cocteau would serve as something of a figurehead throughout the 1950s and was several times president of the jury. During the same decade Yves Klein, an artist associated with the Ecole de Nice, executed one of his first neo-Dada acts by 'signing' the dazzling blue of the Riviera sky, calling it his "first and biggest monochrome". But the combination of the tuxedoed beau monde and artistic enfants terribles could prove combustible.

At the fourth festival in 1951 the shock troops of the Parisian avant-garde descended uninvited in the shape of the Lettrists. Led by 26-year-old Jean-Isidore Golstein (known as Isidore Isou), they hustled a screening of Isou's four-hour epic of anti-cinema Traité de bave et d'éternité. Less significant than the predictable displays of audience hostility was the effect it had on 19-year-old lycée graduate Guy-Ernest Debord. Debord returned to Cannes the following year as part of a 'Lettrist commando team' and a fracas with the festival organisers led to arrests. Many years later the Situationist leader would muse self-regardingly that "the atmosphere of hate and malediction" that surrounded him was perhaps not because of the Situationists' role in fomenting the 'events' of May 1968, claiming: "I think rather that it is what I did in 1952 that has been disliked for so long."

2. All in the family

François Truffaut memorably summed up the classic career trajectory of the enfant terrible as leading from scandal and controversy to "a house in the country and the Légion d'honneur". He forgot to mention that the route has often passed via the Croisette, whose bourgeoisie has learned to love being shocked by successive generations of cinematic scandalmongers. Truffaut's regular broadsides against the festival as a young critic saw him banned in 1958. He attended nonetheless, declaring in print: "The next festival is condemned!" His first feature Les Quatre Cents Coups went on to win the Best Director prize the following year, neatly demonstrating that one of the ways Cannes handles its critics is to co-opt them into what president Gilles Jacob calls "the Cannes family".

Some scandals really take the pulse of the times. In 1973 awards for Marco Ferreri's gastronomic shocker La Grande Bouffe and Jean Eustache's punishing psybeeprama La Maman et la Putain led to outraged speeches in the Assemblée Nationale. But these films were selected as responses to the social upheavals of May '68 and reflected the shift in sexual mores evident elsewhere in the festival in the increased presence of hardcore pornography.

Perhaps the most persistent of present-day provocateurs is Lars von Trier, who from his first invitation in 1984 has routinely rubbished any laurel other than the Palme d'Or. In 1991 he called jury president Roman Polanski "a midget" and he didn't even bother to show up when Breaking the Waves competed in 1996.

3. Champagne and sunbathing

Where the British say 'champagne socialist', the French use the equally derisive gauche caviar - and in 1968 Cannes served up generous helpings of both. That year the festival was caught up in the tumult of demonstrations and strikes that gripped France, and a group of film-makers led by Truffaut, Godard and Louis Malle succeeded in shutting it down in sympathy with the students and workers.

While the wider gains of May '68 have been disputed ever since, Cannes would not be the same afterwards. One of the protestors' demands had been that the festival 'democratise' itself and become more open to world cinema, which led to the creation of the Quinzaine des Réalisateurs (Directors' Fortnight) sidebar where coming talents from around the world could show their films. Quinzaine co-founder Jean-Gabriel Albicocco later claimed that what happened in May '68 "saved the Cannes festival for the next 30 years." In the three years following 1968 it looked as if Cannes had caught the counter-cultural bug in a major way, with prizes awarded to such paeans to libertarianism and revolt as Easy Rider, If...., M*A*S*H and Z. But Gilles Jacob's ironic description of the atmosphere at the 1969 event still holds true: "One rushes to the aid of the oppressed minorities before going sunbathing."

4. Taking on the world

One of the direct results of 1968 was a change in the way films were selected. From 1971 onwards it was no longer competitor countries which nominated titles but the festival itself. This overlapped with the extraordinary vitality of 'third cinema', which responded to post-colonial liberation struggles and life under dictatorial regimes.

In 1969 Glauber Rocha won the Best Director prize for Antonio das Mortes, providing recognition to Brazil's cinema novo. In the same year Andrei Tarkovsky's Andrei Rublev took the International Critics Prize, much to the fury of the Soviet authorities. Cinematic reckoning with France's own protracted and bloody colonial war in Algeria took longer to materialise: in 1975 Algerian director Mohamed Lakhdar Hamina's Chronique des années de braise (Chronicle of the Years of Fire), an account of the Algerian nationalist struggle, took the Palme d'Or in an atmosphere made febrile by death threats and bombings.

The radicalism of the 1960s has since transmogrified into the defence of 'human rights', with directors such as Poland's Andrzej Wajda and Iran's Abbas Kiarostami among the beneficiaries of what has been dubbed the 'unspoken function' of Cannes, the laudable aim of defending film-makers from censorship.

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http://film.guardian.co.uk/cannes2007/story/0,,2089689,00.html

Gritty Romanian tale of abortion and sacrifice wins Cannes Palme d'Or

Alexandra Topping
Monday May 28, 2007
The Guardian



A disturbing tale of illegal abortion in communist-era Romania won the Cannes film festival's top prize yesterday as director Cristian Mungiu beat 21 contenders to take the much-coveted Palme d'Or for his film 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days.

The low-budget film tells the story of Gabita, a student who has a risky back-alley abortion, and the horrific consequences she and her friend Otilia suffer as a result in Ceausescu's Romania. The critics praised the film's realism and the humility shown in Otilia's sacrifice for her friend.

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Mungiu, addressing a crowded Grand Théatre Lumière last night, said: "This kind of attention that we got here, all around the festival, this story in which we believe so much, is going to reach lots of people now.

"I also hope that this award that I am getting tonight is going to be good news for small film-makers from small countries, because it looks like you don't necessarily need a big budget and a lot of stars."

The Nobel prize-winning author Orhan Pamuk, who was on the Cannes jury, said: "This was a great film. It was a pleasure to watch every second of it."

There was also some good news for the British film industry when Control, a film about the life of Ian Curtis, from the rock group Joy Division, was given a special mention. The film, starring an unknown, Sam Riley, as well as Samantha Morton as Curtis's wife, took Cannes by storm.

The director had to plough his own money into the black-and-white film about Curtis's creative flowering and eventual suicide 27 years ago, because he was refused UK public cash for his first feature film. East Midlands Media, a regional film development agency, provided some of the money, which led to the film being mostly shot in Nottingham.

Cannes' second prize, known as the Grand Prize, went to a Japanese film, The Mourning Forest. The work, directed by Naomi Kawase, explores mourning and grief through the story of a retirement home resident and a caretaker.

The award for best director went to the American painter-director Julian Schnabel for The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, based on the true story of a French journalist who was paralysed after a stroke and learned to write again by blinking his eyelid.

Gus Van Sant, who won the Palme d'Or in 2003 for Elephant, won a special prize for Cannes' 60th anniversary for the impressionistic Paranoid Park, which tells the story of a teenage skateboarder who accidentally kills a security guard.

The best screenplay was awarded to the German-Turkish director Fatih Akin for The Edge of Heaven, a cross-border tale of love and reconciliation which he both wrote and directed.

A Russian, Konstantin Lavronenko, took the best actor award for his portrayal of a troubled husband in The Banishment, while the prize for best actress went to South Korea's Jeon Do-yeon, who played a widow mourning her husband in Secret Sunshine.

Persepolis, Marjane Satrapi's adaptation of her graphic novel about growing up during Iran's 1979 Islamic revolution, shared the jury prize with Stellet Licht (Silent Night), Carlos Reygadas' story of love set among Mennonite farmers of northern Mexico. The jurors broke with tradition earlier in the week to award a top prize to the incomplete California Dreamin', a film about American soldiers in a small Romanian village.