Cannes2020 Official Selection

The Cannes Film Festival has just made the unprecedented move of announcing the lineup that would have been had there been a festival this year. It includes:

The French Dispatch (Wes Anderson)

Summer of 85 (François Ozon)

True Mothers (Naomi Kawase)

Lovers Rock (Steve McQueen)

Mangrove (Steve McQueen)

Another Round (Thomas Vinterberg)

DNA (Maïwenn)

Last Words (Jonathan Nossiter)

Heaven: To The Land of Happiness (Im Sang-soo)

El olvido que seremos (Fernando Trueba)

Peninsula (Yeon Sang-ho)

In the Dusk (Sharunas Bartas)

Des hommes (Lucas Belvaux)

The Real Thing (Koji Fukada)

• Newcomers

Passion simple (Danielle Arbid)

A Good Man (Marie-Castille Mention-Schaar)

Les Choses qu’on dit, les choses qu’on fait, (Emmanuel Mouret)

Souad (Ayten Amin)

Limbo (Ben Sharrock)

Red Soil (Farid Bentoumi)

Sweat (Magnus von Horn)

Teddy (Ludovic and Zoran Boukherma)

February (Kamen Kalev)

Ammonite (Francis Lee)

Un médecin de nuit (Elie Wajeman)

Enfant terrible (Oskar Roehler)

Butterfly (Pascal Plante)

Here We Are (Nir Bergman)

• A film in sketches

Septet : The Story of Hongkong (Ann Hui, Johnnie To, Tsui Hark, Sammo Hung, Yuen Woo-Ping, Patrick Tam and Ringo Lam)

• Debut films

Falling (Viggo Mortensen)

Pleasure (Ninja Thyberg)

Slalom (Charlène Favier)

Memory House (Joao Paulo Miranda Maria)

Broken Keys (Jimmy Keyrouz)

Ibrahim (Samir Guesmi)

Beginning (Dea Kulumbegashvili)

Gagarine (Fanny Liatard and Jérémy Trouilh)

16 printemps (Suzanne Lindon)

Vaurien (Peter Dourountzis)

Garçon chiffon (Nicolas Maury)

Should The Wind Fall (Nora Martirosyan)

John and The Hole (Pascual Sisto)

Striding into The Wind (Wei Shujun)

The Death of Cinema and My Father Too (Dani Rosenberg)

• Documentaries

The Billion Road (Dieudo Hamadi)

The Truffle Hunters (Michael Dweck and Gregory Kershaw)

9 jours à Raqqa (Xavier de Lauzanne)

• Comedies

Antoinette dans les Cévennes (Caroline Vignal)

Les Deux Alfred (Bruno Podalydès)

The Big Hit (Emmanuel Courcol)

L’Origine du monde (Laurent Lafitte)

Le Discours (Laurent Tirard)

• Animated films

Earwig and the Witch (Goro Miyazaki)

Flee (Jonas Poher Rasmussen)

Josep (Aurel)

Soul (Pete Docter)

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We saw some of these coming in our traditional, totally scientific Cannes predictions, but as always there were surprises too. In this case mostly surprise omissions.

Surefire Cannes candidates including BENEDETTA, ANNETTE, BERGMAN ISLAND, MEMORIA and ON THE ROCKS will not be getting the singular (if mostly symbolic) Cannes2020 label. Probably not because Thierry Frémaux wouldn’t have liked to welcome the likes of Paul Verhoeven and Adam Driver to his party though. The fact of the matter is, this year going to the party is different. It means being put on the most exclusive guest list for something that’s not happening. For smaller films or new talents (today’s lineup includes a presumably record number of debut films), the prestige of the Cannes label alone would likely help them get distribution deals or gain name recognition. But if you are Apple or Sofia Coppola, you’d probably ask yourself if this is the best way to launch your new work.

Adding to the confusion is the fact that no one seems to know exactly how the Cannes2020 label will work on the festival circuit. Can a Cannes-selected film still “world premiere” at another festival? Can a Cannes film end up winning Venice? There were murmurs about a potential collaboration between the two most influential European festivals at the start of the Corona pandemic, but it seems clear after today’s announcement that Venice (and even San Sebastian) will stick to existing premiere requirements and limit competition slots to WP’s in the strictest sense. Is this obsession with being the first to show a film a bit silly / narrow-minded? Maybe. But then again, announcing a lineup without a festival also feels weirdly possessive to some extent.

Backed by French production deals, we can safely expect to see BENEDETTA and ANNETTE, among others, at Cannes next year. Meanwhile, it’s safe to assume that some of the Cannes would-have-been’s (Nanni Moretti’s THREE FLOORS, for example) will show up at Venice later this year. How any of that will play out – skipping Cannes to bet on another festival that may not happen after all, holding out for one whole year to get the full Cannes treatment, or taking a fancy label and make the most out of it – is anyone’s guess at this time.

Amid all this uncertainty, it’s another type of surprise to see British director Steve McQueen featured twice in the Cannes2020 selection with two features from his BBC anthology series SMALL AXE entitled MANGROVE and LOVER’S ROCK. In a statement following today’s announcement, the Oscar winner for 12 YEARS A SLAVE dedicated the films to George Floyd and the BLM movement. It’s a touching gesture and puts things into perspective. America is cracking down on protesters, China is cracking down on protesters, the entirety of Latin America is at the peak of a deadly pandemic while a global recession is just around the corner. The world is literally burning and we should all have better things to do than worrying about the premiere status of THE FRENCH DISPATCH. Having said that, if there’s one thing I learned during these weeks/months of quarantine, it’s that films, or the arts in general, may not be essential in sustaining lives, but they’re an essential part of what makes life worth living. So, as indulgent and oblivious as it might sound: Vive le cinéma.