Strike and film from Russia expected at Cannes Film Festival

Ilya Povolotsky will present “Wish”: from Kabardino-Balkaria to the Kola Peninsula

The 76th Cannes Film Festival will be held on the Cote d’Azur from 16 to 27 May. The jury of the main competition will be headed by two-time winner of the Palme d’Or, Swedish director Ruben Östlund (Square, Triangle of Sorrow).

On the official poster of the festival – a young Catherine Deneuve. She stands on the Côte d’Azur during the filming of Alain Cavalier’s 1968 Franco-Italian “Surrender” based on the novel “Signal to Surrender” by Françoise Sagan. It is already known that the Croisette is waiting for a strike. Trade union organizations are threatening to leave the festival without electricity, thus protesting against the pension reform.

The main competition features new films by Aki Kaurismäki, Ken Loach, Marco Bellocchio, Nanni Moretti Wes Anderson, Jessica Hausner, Alice Rohrwacher, Nuri Bilge Ceylan, Hirokazu Koreeda. That is, the entire iconostasis of world cinema in recent years is again involved. Strangers do not go here, except sometimes. A year ago, there was shown “Tchaikovsky’s Wife” by Kirill Serebrennikov, who had already left Russia. There are no pictures this year.

Only in independent from the directorate of the festival “Directors’ Fortnight”, which will be the 55th in a row, will the premiere of the film “Blizh” by Ilya Povolotsky take place. He is a documentary filmmaker who learned the directing profession without education, traveling around the country.

His feature film, selected for Cannes, also tells about the journey that a father and his teenage daughter make with a film projector and an urn with the ashes of the girl’s mother. The film was shot in Kabardino-Balkaria, Kalmykia, Stavropol Territory, Rostov and Murmansk regions, Karelia and St. Petersburg.

Operator Nikolai Zheludovich – from Belarus. At the last Kinotavr, he received for the film Bird’s Milk. Together with Ilya, he worked on his documentary film “Northerners”. The main roles in the film “The Bliss” were played by 19-year-old Maria Lukyanova and non-professional Georgian actor Gela Chitava, who made his debut in “Shultes” Bakura Bakuradze.

The Cinefondation film school competition, which is now called La Cinef, will feature the animated Elektra by Daria Kashcheeva, representing the FAMU Prague Film School. There Daria is studying at the department of animation and experimental theater. In her picture there are dolls and people, live actors.

Daria’s previous film “Daughter” won the award at the main animation festival in French Annecy as the best student film, then received a student “Oscar” and was nominated for the big “Oscar” -2020. Her painting represented the Czech Republic.

The jury of the short film competition and the Cinefondacion competition will be headed by the Hungarian director Ildiko Enyedi. In 1989, she received the Golden Camera for her debut at the Cannes Film Festival, where she presented the film My XX Century with the participation of Oleg Yankovsky.