A peek at some of the films to watch out for at this year’s festival
A candid story about love; and how human beings’ shortcomings get in the way
“The population of Sisco lives in permanent fear. There are many provocateurs here … We are living on a powder keg,” he said.’
An armed man has held up an exhibition in the French Riviera resort of Cannes, making away with jewels estimated to be worth about $53-million.
The teaser poster and trailer for "Mandela: Long Walk to Freedom" has been unveiled at the prestigious 66th Cannes Film Festival.
Typically for Cannes, where critical passions run high, both cheers and boos rang out as entries vying for the Palme d’Or prize award were shown.
Danish director Lars von Trier said Wednesday he sympathised "a little bit" with Adolf Hitler at the Cannes film festival.
France this week jolted Europe into establishing common policies on immigration, refugees and asylum, but the move has not been welcomed by all.
Agnes Poirier looks at Laurent Cantet’s film <i>Entre les Murs </i>, which won the Palme d’Or at this year’s Cannes Festival.
The director of Entre les Murs, the French classroom drama that won the main Cannes film prize said on Sunday he had been deeply moved by the applause that met the film when it was shown at the festival. Entre les Murs (The Class) became the first French film in 21 years to claim the coveted Palme d’Or award at the world’s biggest film festival.
A lack of memorable movies mean the 2008 Cannes film festival is unlikely to live long in the minds of many critics, who argue that after a solid start the main competition faded. With four out of 22 films in the main competition this year yet to screen, critics and journalists struggled to come up with many highlights.
Back after 19 years, the new Indiana Jones film premiered at Cannes. Charlotte Higgins reports from the festival.
Diego Maradona, the Argentinian soccer genius notorious for the ”Hand of God” goal and a post-football descent into drugs, hits the big screen in Cannes on Tuesday in a documentary that also shows him as a staunch critic of the United States. Maradona is revered as a god-like figure in his home country.
Repressed memories, the horrors of war and Israel’s dubious role in a notorious Beirut refugee camp massacre are the themes of the Cannes film festival’s first ever fully-animated documentary. Ari Folman’s anti-war movie is premiered in Cannes as Israel celebrates its 60th year of existence and its neighbour Lebanon hits yet another political crisis pushing it to the brink of civil war.
Kicking kung-fu pandas and a chilling Brazilian vision of the apocalypse: the Cannes film festival kicked off on Wednesday blending fun with philosophy, and Hollywood blockbusters with arthouse fare. The world release of the latest long-awaited episode of whip-cracking Indiana Jones is set to be the star act of the 12-day film bonanza.
George Clooney, Brad Pitt, Matt Damon and other members of the all-star caper Ocean’s Thirteen made off with millions at Cannes ahead of the movie’s red-carpet premiere on Thursday. The A-list cast raised ,2-million at an exclusive charity bash for Sudanese uprooted by the savage conflict in Darfur.
The Cannes Film Festival opens on Wednesday with a mix of arthouse movie making and raw star power fitting for cinema’s greatest showcase, which turns 60 this year. Chinese director Wong Kar Wai, best known in the West for In The Mood For Love, brings My Blueberry Nights” to the palm-lined Riviera resort.
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/ 16 February 2007
Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir on Friday rejected a United Nations peace force for Darfur and said he would not grant visas to UN rights monitors who want to visit the strife-torn region. Bashir said an international force in Darfur would remain under the aegis of the African Union and that the UN would be confined to a ”technical and logistics role”.
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/ 16 February 2007
The leaders of Sudan, Chad and the Central African Republic met on Thursday and declared they would not back rebels attacking each other’s territory — repeating a pledge that has failed to stop fighting in the past. Violence in Sudan’s Darfur province has spilled over into the neighbouring states, which accuse Sudan of supporting rebels launching cross-border attacks.
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/ 15 February 2007
Chad’s foreign minister accused Sudan of attacking his country and said talks expected on Thursday between the two neighbours and the Central African Republic (CAR) would be ”useless”. Violence in Sudan’s western region of Darfur has spilled over into neighbouring Chad and the CAR, both of which blame Khartoum for the attacks.
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/ 15 February 2007
A summit intended to strengthen ties between Africa and former colonial power France opened on Thursday but all eyes will be on a subject not on the agenda — Sudan’s battered Darfur province. The United Nations Security Council has proposed sending peacekeepers to secure Darfur’s border area, but UN officials say there must first be peace.
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/ 15 February 2007
An era draws to a close this week when French President Jacques Chirac hosts his last summit of leaders from Africa, a continent where France’s traditional influence is being threatened by resource-hungry China. Chirac’s office said there would likely be a meeting on Thursday between the heads of Sudan, Central Afrian Republic and Chad about Darfur.
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/ 25 January 2007
Live music and internet-based social networking sites YouTube and MySpace are helping break new music acts — but video games are the latest new cool music space. ”It’s a great way of breaking new artists,” Joseph Stopps of independent, United Kingdom-based dance-music company MofoHifi said.
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/ 25 January 2007
Asia’s passion for singing and karaoke may be legendary, but now Asians are so enamoured of Western opera that Europe’s music academies are bursting at the seams with young Korean and Chinese opera students with stars in their eyes. ”The Koreans are mad about opera,” Christophe Capacci, the new artistic director for classical music and jazz at Midem.
A knot of police officers rush into a burning office building to evacuate survivors. They hear a hellish rumble above and dash for haven in an elevator vestibule as the structure collapses around them. So begins Oliver Stone’s World Trade Center, the first 25 minutes of which was previewed at the Cannes Film Festival.
A searing indictment of former Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi wrapped into a tender story of one man’s bid to overcome failure won a rapturous welcome from Cannes critics on Monday. Director Nanni Moretti’s film was released in March, just before the elections in which the conservative Berlusconi was narrowly ousted after five years in office.
Sex — in many forms and, in at least one case, unsimulated — is heating up screens at the Cannes film festival, confirming the event’s reputation for taboo-busting fare. About five films in the official selection alone have already shown enough nudity to mark them for mature audiences only, and one, Shortbus, by United States director John Cameron Mitchell, blurred the boundary between pornography and art with its actors engaged in real intercourse.
Spanish director Pedro Almodóvar went back to his roots on Friday, paying homage to his mother and all women in his haunting film Volver, already hotly-tipped for the coveted Palme d’Or prize. Penélope Cruz gives a stunning performance as a young, hardworking mother who has to confront the ghosts of her past.
Amid an unprecedented amount of hype and hoopla for an opening movie at the Cannes film festival, it took the inimitable Ian McKellen to knock Dan Brown and his swollen bestseller down to size with a single word — ”codswallop”. The Cannes film festival has an ambiguous relationship with Hollywood, on the one hand championing auteur cinema and film-making as an art, on the other lapping up blockbuster glitz.
Critics on Wednesday crucified Hollywood’s hotly awaited film of the runaway bestseller, The Da Vinci Code, ahead of its glittering premiere at the Cannes Film Festival. Several disappointed whistles were all that greeted the end of Ron Howard’s -million film, and, even worse, the 2 000-strong audience even burst out laughing at the movie’s key moment.
Tom Hanks and the other stars of The Da Vinci Code were to arrive in Cannes on Tuesday ahead of an exclusive preview screening of the movie version of the bestselling novel by Dan Brown. This was to effectively raise the curtain on the Cannes film festival a day early this year.
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/ 1 February 2006
Tetsuya Wakuda went to Australia 24 years ago in search of kangaroos and koala bears. What he found instead were ocean trout and octopus, two of the local ingredients that inspired his ground-breaking cooking style. In recognition of his singular impact on Australian cuisine he was last week named personality of the year along with French chef Pierre Gagnaire and British wine writer Hugh Johnson.