Cannes 75: Films By Hogg, Aster, Sachs, Fukada, Dominik and Sokurov Still Looking For A Home

In my final Cannes predictions, I correctly got 13 out of the 18 competition titles announced. The ones I missed were Valeria Bruni Tedeschi’s “Les Amandiers,” Mario Martone’s “Nostalgia,” Saeed Roustaee’s “Leila’s Brothers,” Tarik Saleh’s “Boy From Heaven,” and Jerzy Skolimowski’s “Hi-Han.”

All five were fairly unexpected surprises. In fact, my jaw dropped at the inclusion of the Saleh, he’s the director of the just-released “The Contractor,” starring Chris Pine. The other notable film he’s directed is the Sundance-winning “The Nile Hilton Incident,” which was pretty underwhelming.

There were also titles that were very much in the running for competition, but are now “free agents.” They can either go to one of the sidebars (Directors Fortnight, Critics’ Week) or be late additions to the Cannes Film Festival.

Already three Cannes-bound films have been snatched up by Directors Fortnight:

Mia Hansen-Love’s “One Fine Morning”
Pietro Marcello’s “Scarlett”
Serge Bozon’s “Don Juan”

High-profile omissions that are ready and still looking for a home:

Angela Schanelec’s “Music”
Koji Fukada’s “Love Life”
Faith Akin’s “Rheingold”
Alexander Sokourov’s “Gjirokastra”
Joanna Hogg’s “The Eternal Daughter”
Emanuele Crialese’s “L’immensita”

I’m being told the Schanelec was rather too radical, narratively-speaking, for Cannes. She could very well wait it out until Berlin 2023.

Polley was in competition, until she wasn’t.

Sokurov is Russian, he even teaches film at a Russian university. His last movie “Faust” went to Venice, so maybe it’ll be selected there.

There are currently 1-2 open spots left in the official competition to fill in the quota for French films, any of these could be one of those late announced titles:

Alice Diop’s “Saint Omer”
Alice Winocour “Au Revoir Paris”
Christophe Honoré “Le Monde d’Hier”
Lea Mysius’ “The Five Devils”
Emmanuel Mouret’s “Chronique d'une liaison passagèr”
Rebecca Zlotowski “Les Enfants des Autres”
Jean Paul Civeyrac’s “Une Femme de Notre Temps”

As reported here these last few months, there were some films that were just not ready for Cannes and those included, Florian Zeller’s “The Son,” Alejandro González Iñárritu’s “Bardo,” Yorgos Lanthimos’ “Poor Things,” Ari Aster’s “Disappointment Blvd,” Jonathan Glazer’s “The Zone of Interest,” Wes Anderson’s “Asteroid City,” Damien Chazelle’s “Babylon,” Todd Field’s “TAR,” Paul Schrader’s “The Master Gardener,” Sarah Polley’s “Women Talking,” and Luca Guadagnino’s “Bones & All.”

I had been told that Ira Sachs’ “Passages” was in competition, what happened? Maybe it’s a late addition. As it currently stands there are only two American films in competition, a third one would be nice.

The mystery surrounding Ari Aster’s “Disappointment Blvd” is a strange one. There was/is a 4-hour cut of the film somewhere, I was told several months ago that it was submitted to Cannes, but it’s nowhere to be found.

It would have also been nice to have Noah Baumbach’s “White Noise” and Andrew Dominik’s “Blonde” go to Cannes, but those are Netflix’s two big movies this year. Cannes and Netflix don’t gel, but you already knew that.