Latest news with #JoachimTrier
BBC News
5 days ago
- Business
- BBC News
BBC Film celebrates four Jury awards at Cannes Film Festival 2025
Four films backed by BBC Film premiered in Official Selection at the Cannes Film Festival 2025, with all four receiving Jury recognition, including three debut features from UK-based filmmakers. The awards were as follows: The Grand Prix was awarded to SENTIMENTAL VALUE, Joachim Trier's poignant, poetic portrait of family dynamics starring Renate Reinsve, Stellan Skarsgård, Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas, and Elle Fanning Akinola Davies Jnr's heartfelt father-son tale and directorial debut MY FATHER'S SHADOW, starring Ṣọpẹ́ Dìrísù, received the Caméra d'Or Special Mention Harry Lighton's debut feature, the provocative romance PILLION starring Alexander Skarsgård and Harry Melling, received the Un Certain Regard Best Screenplay award Frank Dillane received the Un Certain Regard Best Actor award for his magnetic performance in Harris Dickinson's feature directorial debut, URCHIN In addition to the official juries' awards, URCHIN also received the FIPRESCI prize, voted for by international film critics. Eva Yates, Director of BBC Film says of the Cannes awards: 'It has been a privilege to develop and collaborate on four exceptional films selected to screen in Cannes and we are ecstatic that all four have all been recognised by the Cannes juries this past weekend. We're thrilled to see three wildly different and highly original independent debut features from UK-based writer-directors and UK producers - MY FATHER'S SHADOW, PILLION and URCHIN - receive this recognition. And we wholeheartedly congratulate the Grand Prix winning Joachim Trier and the whole SENTIMENTAL VALUE team for this poignant, poetic portrait of family dynamics which will resonate with BBC audiences and cinemagoers worldwide and for many years to come.' About the films: Akinola Davies' MY FATHER'S SHADOW - Un Certain Regard Akinola Davies Jr's feature directorial debut stars Ṣọpẹ́ Dìrísù (His House, Gangs of London) and is based on a script by Wale Davies and Akinola Davies Jr, whose previous collaboration on BBC Film-backed short Lizard won the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance 2021 and was nominated for a BAFTA. MY FATHER'S SHADOW tells the story of two kid brothers, Remi and Akin who get to spend a gift of a day with their estranged father Folarin. They go on a voyage into Lagos observing the colossal city for the first time and the hoops their father must deal with to provide. All this is happening in the backdrop of a huge 1993 presidential election result which calls into question his ability to get them home. MY FATHER'S SHADOW is produced by Rachel Dargavel for Element Pictures and Funmbi Ogunbanwo for Fatherland Productions, who also serviced production on the ground. Executive Producers are Ed Guiney and Andrew Lowe for Element Pictures, Eva Yates for BBC Film and Ama Amapadu for the BFI. Ṣọpẹ́ Dìrísù, Wale Davies and Akinola Davies Jr also act as executive producers. MY FATHER'S SHADOW was developed by BBC Film and was co-financed by BBC Film and the BFI (awarding National Lottery funding). The Match Factory is handling worldwide sales. MUBI pre-bought all rights in North America, UK, Ireland, and Turkey. Harry Lighton's PILLION - Un Certain Regard PILLION is the debut feature of BAFTA-nominated writer/director Harry Lighton (Wren Boys) and stars Harry Melling (The Pale Blue Eye, The Queen's Gambit) and Emmy and Golden Globe winner Alexander Skarsgård (Big Little Lies, Succession, The Northman). In PILLION a timid man is swept off his feet when an enigmatic, impossibly handsome biker takes him on as his submissive. PILLION is an Element Pictures production financed by BBC Film, BFI (awarding National Lottery funding), Picturehouse Entertainment and September Film who will handle distribution in the UK and Benelux respectively. The screenplay was developed with BBC Film and is based on Adam Mars-Jones' 'Box Hill' which was the 2019 Fitzcarraldo Editions Nobel Prize winner. Producers are Element Pictures' Emma Norton, Ed Guiney and Andrew Lowe together with Lee Groombridge. BBC Film's Eva Yates, Louise Ortega for the BFI, Claire Binns for Picturehouse, September Film's Pim Hermeling, Cornerstone's Alison Thompson and Mark Gooder and Alexander Skarsgård are Executive Producers. A24 have USD rights. Harris Dickinson's URCHIN - Un Certain Regard The feature debut of writer, director and acclaimed actor, Harris Dickinson who also previously made his short film 2003 with BBC Film. Written by Dickinson, the story follows Mike, a rough sleeper in London, trapped in a cycle of self-destruction as he attempts to turn his life around. URCHIN stars Frank Dillane (Harvest, The Walking Dead) as 'Mike', alongside Megan Northam, Amr Waked, Karyna Khymchuk and Shonagh Marie. The film is produced by Archie Pearch for Devisio Pictures and Scott O'Donnell for Somesuch. Developed by BBC Film, URCHIN is financed by BBC Film, BFI (awarding National Lottery funding) and Tricky Knot. Executive Producers are Eva Yates, Ama Ampadu, Alexandra Tynion and Olivia Tyson. Charades is handling international sales, Gersh and UTA Independent Film Group are co-repping the film in the US. Joachim Trier's SENTIMENTAL VALUE - In Competition Trier's sixth feature film stars Renate Reinsve who previously collaborated with Trier for The Worst Person in the World (Academy Award nominee for Best Screenplay and Best International Feature) alongside Stellan Skarsgård, Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas, and Elle Fanning. SENTIMENTAL VALUE follows actress Nora (Reinsve) and her sister Agnes (Lilleaas) as their eccentric and charismatic father, Gustav, suddenly reappears in their lives after a long absence. Once a renowned film director, Gustav now offers Nora the lead role in his new film, but working with her father is the last thing she wants. The film is produced by Maria Ekerhovd for Mer Film and Andrea Berentsen Ottmar for Eye Eye Pictures in Norway. A Norwegian, French, German, Danish, and Swedish co-production, the co-producers are MK Productions, Nathanael Karmitz and Lumen Production, Juliette Schrameck for France; Komplizen Film, Jonas Dornbach and Janine Jackowski for Germany; Zentropa, Sisse Graum and Lizette Jonjic for Denmark and Sweden; Film I Väst, Kristina Åkeson; and BBC Film, Eva Yates for the UK and Ireland. Additional support comes from Arte Grand Accord, Oslo Filmfond, and Storyline. Mk2 Films are handling international sales and NEON is handling US distribution. SENTIMENTAL VALUE is financed with partners including the Norwegian Film Institute, the Swedish Film Institute, The Danish Film Institute, Arte, Medienboard Berlin Brandenburg, FFA, and Eurimages. CG
Yahoo
5 days ago
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Breaking Baz @ Cannes: 'Even If I'm Fired, I Stay,' Declares Defiant Thierry Frémaux; Festival Victors Dance The Night Away After Strongest Selection In Years
Thierry Frémaux, the Delegate Général of the Cannes Film Festival, is propping up the Majestic Beach's main bar. The joint's buzzing, the victors being lionized after what has been acknowledged as a strong competition and selection, and I have the temerity to wonder idly when he'll retire. 'I don't know,' he murmurs. 'You know, in France the social contract is something different.' More from Deadline Cannes Winners: Palme D'Or Goes To Jafar Panahi's 'It Was Just An Accident'; Grand Prize Is Joachim Trier's 'Sentimental Value'; 'The Secret Agent' Scores For Wagner Moura & Kleber Mendonça Filho – Full List Cannes Film Festival 2025: Read All Of Deadline's Movie Reviews Including Palme D'Or Winner 'It Was Just An Accident' Cannes Winners Are Again Good For Neon But Create Confusing Picture For Oscar Race - Which Films Could Place In Both? 'Even if I'm fired, I stay,' he finishes defiantly. He laughs, then turns the tables and cheekily asks when I will retire. 'I don't want you to retire,' he says caressing my arm. 'Stay with us.' Fremaux first visited Cannes in 1979, driving from Lyon in a truck. Every day that year he remained on the Croisette without watching any movies 'because I couldn't attend any film. Each evening I used to go back to the highway and sleep in the car in the gas station.' Today (it now being the early hours of Sunday) he says, he will pick up his car at the Carlton 'and go back to Lyon like I was 19 again,' he says wistfully. 'It's in my tradition to come by car… we need to feel, I don't want to say forever young, but it is something like that. When you, me, whoever, are in the screening room there is no age. No young people, no old people.' Together we marvel over the diversity of the winners. There's Jafar Panahi, the Iranian-born director of Palme d'or winner It Was Just An Accident, and Norwegian Joachim Trier who took the Grand Prix prize for Sentimental Value. Oliver Laxe, director of Sirât, born in Paris to Galician emigrants, was joint Jury Prize winner with Berlin-born Mascha Schilinski the director of Sound of Falling, and so on all the way to Nigerian-born Akinola Davies Jr. who was garlanded with a Special Mention by the Caméra d'or jury for My Father's Shadow which was shown in Un Certain Regard. I note that Nadia Melliti who is French-Algerian heritage was named best actress for her beautifully captured performance as a young woman discovering her attraction for other women in Hafsia Herzi's The Little Sister, while it seemed that the the Cannes bubble was cheering for Jennifer Lawrence to win for Die, My Love – Lynne Ramsay's incendiary study of the disintegration of a marriage. Melliti tells me that Herzi's casting director discovered her 'walking along the street.' She'd never acted before. Her background was in sport. Now it's in acting. I tell Frémaux that it angers me that people forget that Cannes represents the whole world, not just the white western bit of it, and that cinema isn't just the shiny and splashy stuff from Hollywood. Nodding in agreement, Frémaux remarks that since the origin of Cannes 'we are universal,' and remembers John Ford's comment, 'Be local, you will be universal.' 'We are not in France,' says Frémaux. 'Cannes is not a French film festival. It's a film festival in France and it's an international film festival,' he says reminding me that its official name is Festival International du Film. 'We have for the first time Nigeria in Un Certain Regard. We have Czech, Iran… Cannes is a journey. We make that journey in the selection process.' He observes that in the past Asia meant films only from Japan. 'And then in the beginning of the new century, Korea, China, Singapore, Thailand. And now it's Africa and not only ex-French Africa,' while conceding that 'maybe not enough' attention had been paid to Africa: 'Again, it's a frustration of the festival' but 'we pay attention on what is going on everywhere …' He looks me in the eye because he knows I'm about to ask about America and the orangutan in the White House, and I mean no offence to the great apes. However, he cuts me off at the chase. 'Regarding, of course, the US and what is going on in the world, in cinema not only in Cannes, there is no border. The language is cinema, the emotion is cinema or cinema is emotion. And the emotion is the same wherever you were born.' I wonder if others will second my emotion that Ari Aster's Eddington is a masterpiece about the sad decline of the United States? Frémaux and I warmly embrace and I scoot over to Renate Reinsve who's so darn good in Trier's Sentimental Value. The actress is taking a break, she tells me, ahead of starring in Alexander Payne's already announced movie Somewhere Out There. 'Not one person has a bad word to say about Alexander and I'm looking forward to working with him,' says Reinsve, although she refuses to say what the film's about, except that 'it's a remarkable script.' Filming, she says, begins in February on locations in Denmark and Ireland. Stellan Skarsgård plays Reinsve's father, a film director, in Sentimental Value. I tell him that the character reminds me, in part, of Lear, except that his filmmaker overcomes his madness. Later, I chat briefly to Elle Fanning who, as I noted in a previous column, excels in Sentimental Value, just as she did in James Mangold's A Complete Unknown. Fanning plays a Hollywood 'type actress' in Trier's movie, but says, that she and the director tried not to make her a caricature. Whatever they did, it's some of her best work. She says that her performance was aided by the fact that she went from shooting Predator: Badlands in New Zealand directly to filming a beach scene with Skarsgård in Deauville. 'It was the kind of role my character might have played, so it was very meta,' says Fanning. Before he goes, I snap a few photos of Trier and his editor Oliver Bugge Coutté. They've been friends for years and, back in the day, shared an apartment with three others in St. John's Wood, NW London, while they were students at the National Film and Television School in Beaconsfield. The flat was ideally situated, he says, because it was close to Marylebone train station, 'just a few stops to the school,' where the late agent Jenne Casarotto first saw his work and signed him. He's still with the Casarotto Ramsay & Associates agency, represented by Elinor Burns. Akinola Davies Jr. shows the same devotion to his longtime agent Roxana Adle at LARK management. The My Father's Shadow director has been inundated since the film was shown at the festival. But he's staying firm with both Adle and Element's Rachel Dargavel. 'To get to me, they'll have to go through Roxana,' says Davies who was on a hike outside Marseilles when he received a message suggesting he return to Cannes in time for the closing ceremony. He was dressed in shorts, T-shirt and boots and his black-tie clobber was in a car miles away in Marseilles. Somehow, he and Nicholas Hayes,his producing partner at Red Clay Pictures, made it back to the Palais in time. I felt sad that Akinola's brother Wale, with whom he wrote the film, was not with him. However, I shall never forget when Davies's name was called and he stood up – and stood out due to his blond-dyed hair – and the world of cinema applauded him. I couldn't make out what he was saying; was it to the crowd or to himself, I asked? 'I have a little motto I repeat to myself when I'm nervous,' he responds, about not being alone and to be kind to yourself and others. Davies spent most of the night hanging out with Hayes, Dargavel, the BFI's Ama Ampadu, as well as Element's Emma Norton and producer Lee Groombridge who were producers on Pillion. Pillion's director Harry Lighton won the best screenplay honour in Un Certain Regard and he was on the Majestic Beach too and there was something touching about seeing them engaging and being supportive of each other. Spotting Jafar Panahi, I went over to pay my respects and to point out that his winning the Palme d'or had brought tears to Cate Blanchett's eyes. 'I saw that,' he acknowledges softly behind dark glasses he's still sporting at one in the morning. I play the room and the pier one last time. Then I hear the beat of Rock This Party (Everybody Dance Now). I look over to the dance floor and it sinks in that the world Frémaux was talking about is on that floor letting its collective hair down. The beat that brings us together must never stop. Best of Deadline 'Poker Face' Season 2 Guest Stars: From Katie Holmes To Simon Hellberg Everything We Know About Amazon's 'Verity' Movie So Far Everything We Know About 'The Testaments,' Sequel Series To 'The Handmaid's Tale' So Far
CairoScene
7 days ago
- Entertainment
- CairoScene
Review: Joachim Trier's Most Emotionally Mature Film Yet
Review: Joachim Trier's Most Emotionally Mature Film Yet 'Sentimental Value' is directed by the acclaimed Norwegian filmmaker Joachim Trier. Trier is best known for introspective and emotionally resonant films like Oslo, August 31st and The Worst Person in the World. The latter earned two Academy Award nominations, including Best International Feature and Best Original Screenplay. With this latest feature, Trier seems to channel the emotional precision of Ingmar Bergman. This very well might be his most mature and accomplished film to date. 'Sentimental Value' screened in the main competition at the 78th Cannes Film Festival. By the time this review gets posted, the winners will have been announced. If it were up to me, this film would win the Palme d'Or. There's a sense in this film that Trier has elevated his craft as a director. His work now reflects not only technical mastery but also a deeper philosophical engagement with his characters and their inner lives. Much like Bergman in films like Scenes from a Marriage, Trier employs a narrator who verbalises the inner states of his characters with startling clarity. Emotions aren't simply identified. They're evoked through vivid metaphors that draw us deeper into the character's interior world. In the opening scene, the narrator recalls how, as a child, the protagonist was asked to choose an object and describe how it felt. She chose her house. She describes how the house hated being empty. How it went through long periods of silence. It hated that feeling. This silence, of course, was due to the absence of a family member. The way the narrator describes the house's emotional state mirrors the void left behind by a family that was on the verge of collapse. When its rooms weren't filled with footsteps or laughter, it felt empty, just like her. From that very first scene, you understand the emotional architecture of the entire family. The writing is devastating. It's a great example of how good narration with vivid descriptive imagery can be a vessel for emotional truth. Co-written with his longtime collaborator Eskil Vogt, the film explores how past wounds shape the present. It's a deeply personal drama that reveals how the stories we tell can become a way of coping and understanding the pain we inherit. The story revolves around Nora Berg (Renate Reinsve), a stage actress grappling with the recent loss of her mother. Her estranged father, Gustav Berg played by Stellan Skarsgård in a powerhouse performance, resurfaces with an unexpected offer. He wants her to play the lead in his new comeback film. The project is clearly autobiographical. Nora refuses. She can't seem to forgive her father for his past mistakes. When she turns him down, Gustav casts a rising Hollywood star, Rachel Kemp (Elle Fanning), in her place. In this role, Fanning displays an impressive range of emotions. Of course, it is not long before she realises that she's is portraying a version of Nora shaped by the director's own memories. What follows is a delicate meditation on the fragile ways art can both reopen wounds and begin to mend them. 'Sentimental Value' is a film about the redemptive power of storytelling. It explores how the act of making cinema can be a form of healing. How re-enacting the traumas of the past can offer a new way of seeing, of understanding, of letting go. In revisiting pain through performance, characters don't just relive their memories. They begin to reshape them. Trier suggests that we might not be able to escape our past. However, through the expression of art, we might just learn how to live with the pain. 'Sentimental Value' is filled with emotional honesty. It's a reminder of why we turn to cinema in the first place. It's to make sense of the world. Great films help us understand why we feel the way we do. They offer a kind of clarity that life often withholds. In doing so, films like this one help us come to terms with the people we love. Not as we wish they were, but as they truly are, flawed and deeply complex. 'Sentimental Value' will almost certainly find itself in the awards conversation by year's end. I loved everything about it.
Local Norway
26-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Local Norway
Today in Norway: A roundup of the latest new on Monday
Norwegian film director wins Grand Prix in Cannes Joachim Trier has made Norwegian film history, winning the prestigious Grand Prix award at the Cannes Film Festival for his latest feature, Affeksjonsverdi . 'This is overwhelming,' Trier said from the stage, after his film received a rare 19-minute standing ovation. It's the first time a Norwegian film has won the award, which is second only to the Palme d'Or. The family drama stars Renate Reinsve and Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas as sisters whose lives are upended by the reappearance of their father, played by Stellan Skarsgård. The film premieres in Norway on September 12. The Palme d'Or was awarded to Iranian director Jafar Panahi for It Was Just An Accident, a thriller inspired by his time in prison. Advertisement Political push to label ultra-processed foods The Centre Party and Red Party have joined forces to demand clearer labelling on ultra-processed foods, ahead of a debate in parliament on Monday. 'We have to give consumers better information,' Rødt MP Geir Jørgensen said, arguing that this was both a public health and class issue. The initiative is backed by nutrition biologist Marit Kolby, who has compared the food industry to the tobacco industry. 'They'll just have to adapt,' she said. Advertisement Explosion in Oslo: two under suspicion Two people are under suspicion after an explosion ripped through a flat in Kampen, Oslo, on Saturday evening, blowing out at least one window. Police believe something was being produced in the apartment that later ignited. "It was powerful," said Oslo police incident commander Steinar Bjerke. The two suspects are being investigated for violating Norway's fire and explosion protection laws. No one was injured, and neighbours who had evacuated were allowed back home later that evening. Homes evacuated after landslide near stranded cargo ship Police in Trøndelag evacuated four homes on Saturday afternoon after a landslide occurred near the grounded cargo ship NCL Salten in Trondheimsfjorden. The slide, which police described as 'ongoing,' is believed to have been triggered near salvage operations for the vessel. 'We're acting on advice from geotechnical experts,' incident commander Viggo Hansen told NRK. Several areas near the vessel have collapsed, with widths ranging from 10 to 50 metres. The road has also been closed and members of the public removed from the area. Advertisement Norway still weighing request to extradite terror suspect from Syria Norwegian prosecutors are still considering whether to formally request the extradition of a woman held in a Syrian detention camp, who is suspected of involvement in the 2022 mass shooting in central Oslo. The woman, a Norwegian national, is being held in the al-Roj camp in Kurdish-controlled northeastern Syria. She is suspected of contributing to a terrorist act and of membership in a terrorist organisation in connection with the attack on June 25th 2022, in which Zaniar Matapour shot and killed two men and injured nine others near the London Pub and Per på Hjørnet in Oslo's nightlife district. So far, no formal extradition request has been sent to Syrian authorities. But state prosecutor Sturla Henriksbø told the Klassekampen and Dagbladet newspapers that Norwegian authorities were talking to Norway's foreign affairs ministry and other government bodies about doing so. A key issue, he noted, is what would happen to the woman's young son, who is also in the camp. 'One specific question is whether it would be possible to bring her son home at the same time, so that we do not take any action that leaves a minor child behind alone in the camp,' Henriksbø said. Complicating matters further is the fact that the camp lies in territory that is not under the control of the Syrian government. However, a recent deal between Damascus and local Kurdish authorities could open a legal pathway for extradition. The woman, who has previously appealed to Norway for assistance, now says she does not wish to be returned. She declined an interview with Dagbladet, but her lawyer, Petar Sekulic, confirmed her opposition to extradition. She denies all charges.
Irish Times
26-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Irish Times
Cannes 2025: Clapologists get it wrong, an acidic Israeli satire is too hot to handle, and Scarlett Johansson serves up schmaltz
A few days before the end of a strong, if rarely spectacular, 78th Cannes film festival , clapologists declared the race for the Palme d'Or over. Securing a bunion-inducing 19-minute standing ovation – by some measures the third-longest in the event's history – Joachim Trier's Sentimental Value could surely not lose. It was hardly worth again pointing out that the length of these compulsory standies has as much to do with when film-makers choose to leave the auditorium as it has with audience sentiment. Anyway, as events played out, Jafar Panahi took the Palme d'Or for the lethally focused thriller It Was Just an Accident. The Iranian film concerns a sometime political prisoner who kidnaps a man he suspects of being his former torturer. But is it really the same fellow? He draws together other ex-prisoners for confirmation, causing pitch-black comedy to vie with harrowing revelation. Panahi , imprisoned by the Iranian state for alleged antigovernment propaganda in 2010, offers a simple tale that reveals multitudes on closer pondering. He becomes only the fourth director to win the three biggest prizes in European cinema, adding the Palme to his Golden Bear, at Berlin, and Golden Lion, at Venice. It was a popular win for the best-reviewed film at the event. READ MORE Cannes 2025: It Was Just an Accident Cannes 2025: Sentimental Value Despite that marathon bout of applause, Sentimental Value had to settle for the Grand Prix, essentially the second prize. Trier , whose The Worst Person in the World wowed Cannes in 2021, returned to more acclaim with this richly appointed study of a veteran film director seeking to draw his actor daughter into a project rooted in murky family history. One cannot escape the comparisons with Ingmar Bergman – Stellan Skarsgard could well be playing a fictionalised variation – but the film also suggests the (nonfunny) Woody Allen films most indebted to that director. The average quality was probably higher than in 2024, even if no title looks likely to emulate the crossover appeal of last year's Palme-winning Anora . There were, however, enough divisive films for this reviewer to mourn the recent inexplicable absence of booing at Cannes. Ari Aster's Eddington, starring Joaquin Phoenix as a New Mexico sheriff who gets caught up in conspiracy theories during the 2020 lockdown, is just the sort of picture that would once have had the unconvinced hissing as the captivated cheered. I cheered (a bit). Aster has fun trolling all political persuasions but can't find a way out of the muddle he has built for his increasingly demented protagonist. Cannes 2025: Eddington Watching Julia Ducournau's Alpha, I thought of Tom Baker's sea captain from Blackadder II. 'Opinion is divided on the subject,' the barnacled veteran said when asked if it was good practice for ships to have a crew. 'All the other captains say it is; I say it isn't.' Well, opinion is divided on Alpha. Almost the entire mass of Cannes felt Ducournau's follow-up to her Palme-winning Titane was a folly, but, unlike me, they were not appreciating the weird complexity of the mingling between Mélissa Boros's determined adolescent and a heroically starved Tahar Rahim as her drug-addicted brother. Why were none of those detractors booing in our packed screening at the Debussy Theatre? A bit of the invigorating rawness of Cannes has gone missing. Boo! One film in competition that did gather a genuine wave of surprised enthusiasm was Óliver Laxe's Sirât. Though set contemporarily, the Spanish film feels as if it is spinning a yarn from the hippie era. Like Milos Forman's Taking Off, from 1971, Sirât follows a man who believes he has lost his child to the counterculture. Luis, played by Sergi López, takes his son and dog to Morocco with a mind to probing the rave community about a missing daughter. Cannes 2025: Óliver Laxe's Sirât This gripping film shared the festival's Jury Prize with Mascha Schilinski's excellent Sound of Falling and took a Grand Jury Prize at the reliably barking Palm Dog awards. That eccentric ceremony, still going strong after 25 years, awarded its main prize for canine excellence to the Icelandic sheepdog Panda, from The Love That Remains, directed by Hlynur Pálmason . The 78th edition saw a rush of movie stars getting behind the camera at the Un Certain Regard section. An appointment with Bono: Stories of Surrender kept me from seeing Kristen Stewart's well-received The Chronology of Water, but I was there for Harris Dickinson's commendable Urchin and for Scarlett Johansson's utterly bogus Eleanor the Great. Dickinson , star of Babygirl and Triangle of Sadness, directs Frank Dillane as an untrustworthy, but charmingly vulnerable, homeless person in a contemporary east London that Dickens would have recognised. Dickinson and Dillane work hard at teasing the audience's sympathies with a character who won't engage his own potential. Cannes 2025: Urchin Cannes 2025: Eleanor the Great In contrast, Johansson tells a tale in which every moral transgression will, we know from the beginning, be negated by an injection of dishonest schmaltz. June Squibb is, of course, touching as an elderly woman relocated to New York after her pal dies in Florida. Adapted from a play by Tory Kamen that I never want to see, Eleanor the Great sets up a series of cardboard-flimsy relationships that exist only to further mechanical dilemmas. From the scenario I expected something 'irresistible' – a word critics use when they cry at a film they know to be bad. I snorted. I groaned. I did not blub. Cannes 2025: Yes! The hottest potato of the festival turned out, as expected, to be Nadav Lapid's acidic Israeli satire Yes! A riot of flashily cut images lays out the story of a young musician who, in the aftermath of the October 7th attacks , takes on the commission for a bloodthirstily jingoistic national anthem. Premiering in Directors' Fortnight, Yes! will unnerve a kaleidoscope of political factions and, as a result, may struggle for distribution in some territories. The Faustian protagonist concludes that Israel has become the answer to its own post-Holocaust wrangling over how people can 'live normally while perpetuating violence'. But Yes! also features a harrowing description of the October 7th assault. 'Blindness in Israel is, unfortunately, a fairly collective illness,' Lapid said at the festival. An essential, uncomfortable watch. What else made noise? Element Pictures , the Dublin-formed production company, scored a special mention from the Camera d'Or jury for best first feature with Akinola Davies jnr's My Father's Shadow, but their larger breakthrough was Harry Lighton's Pillion. The light-footed title, following a young man as he becomes sexually submissive to a handsome biker, took best screenplay in Un Certain Regard and won countless good reviews. Kleber Mendonça Filho won two awards in the main competition for The Secret Agent, a bewitching, patient examination of Brazil during its oppressive 1970s. Some liked Spike Lee's sprawling thriller Highest 2 Lowest, but, despite a reliably charismatic turn from Denzel Washington , I found it contrived and overreaching. Paul Mescal , in town for Oliver Hermanus's The History of Sound , saw that period film greeted with mostly tepid reviews. [ Paul Mescal tries hard but ultimately The History of Sound is flimsy Opens in new window ] Talk of Donald Trump's tariffs gave way to ponderings about Gérard Depardieu's conviction for sexual assault. Palm-tree safety became a concern when one such perennial blew over and injured a Japanese producer. Journalists found the fight for tickets more fraught than ever. But the closing memory will be of panicky annihilation of essential technologies. On the final morning, suspected sabotage caused an enormous power outage that left attendees unable to use ATMs to access the cash that shops, restaurants and travel services could now only accept. The final lesson of Cannes 2025? Always keep an emergency €50 in your wallet.
