Goings On: Farhadi at Cannes and More

Variety’s Elsa Keslassy broke the story yesterday, and now the Cannes Film Festival has confirmed it: Asghar Farhadi’s Everybody Knows with Penélope Cruz and Javier Bardem will open the seventy-first edition on May 8. Shot “in Spanish on the Iberian Peninsula,” the film “charts the story of Laura, who lives with her husband and children in Buenos Aires. When they return together to her native village in Spain for a family celebration, an unexpected event changes the course of their lives. The family, its ties and the moral choices imposed on them lie, as in every one of Farhadi’s scripts, at the heart of the plot.”

Meantime, Terry Gilliam’s The Man Who Killed Don Quixote, twenty years in the making (in one form or another), now has a trailer, too. And, as Charles Barfield reports at the Playlist, it may well be headed to Cannes. Let’s emphasize that this is not a sure thing, but the distributor’s dropped a pretty heavy hint.

At Cineuropa, Fabien Lemercier has listed more films that’ll likely make the lineup, many that probably won’t, and a few that are teetering on the fence.

New York. Hats off “to the intrepid programmers of New York, who somehow keep the city’s multiplexes, art houses, archives, film societies and cultural centers awash in festivals and specialty series.” Mike Hale in the New York Times: “Fighting the twin tides of online streaming and comic-book blockbusters, they’re the real heart of the New York moviegoing experience. As a snapshot of their efforts, we’re highlighting one film from each of nine festivals or series taking place in the city this month alone.” Read about:

• David Pareja’s Indestructible: The Soul of Salsa, screening at the nineteenth Havana Film Festival New York, opening tomorrow and running through April 17
• Jindřich Polák’s Voyage to the End of the Universe (Ikarie XB-1) (1963), part of the Museum of the Moving Image’s series Fashion in Film Festival – Wearing Time: Past, Present, Future, Dream, running from tomorrow through April 22
• Jakob Preuss’s When Paul Came Over the Sea at KINO! 2018 Festival of German Films, tomorrow through April 12
• Hiroshi Inagaki’s The Rickshaw Man (1943), part of Kazuo Miyagawa: Japan’s Greatest Cinematographer, presented by Japan Society from April 13 through 28
• Elio Petri’s The 10th Victim (1965), part of Beyond Morricone: Piero Piccioni and Friends at Anthology Film Archives, April 13 through 22
• The Hand (1965), part of The Puppet Master: The Complete Jiri Trnka at the Film Society of Lincoln Center from April 20 through 25
• Madeleine Sackler’s O.G. at the Tribeca Film Festival running from April 18 through 29
• A Season in France (2017), part of the BAMcinématek series Mahamat-Saleh Haroun: Modern Griot, April 20 through 25
• Sara Johnsen’s Framing Mom, part of New Nordic Cinema, a series running at Scandinavia House through May 4

Los Angeles. “Divesting herself of a trove of bugle beads and showbiz memorabilia, Liza Minnelli is putting more than 1,900 items from her designer wardrobe and extensive archives of Hollywood ephemera up for auction in May,” writes Frank DeCaro for the New York Times. “But before her one-of-a-kind Halston flapper dresses, her Cabaret bowler and annotated shooting script, several large-format Annie Leibovitz portraits, an engraved silver baby cup, a watercolor portrait of her at age 3, and a $20,000 check made out to (and endorsed by) Andy Warhol are put on the block, some noteworthy pieces are being installed at the Paley Center for Media in Beverly Hills, Calif., in a monthlong exhibit called Love, Liza.” Open through April 29.

Chicago. “The Chicago Latino Film Festival is a serious and thoughtful festival, one that considers the cultural climate when it curates its film selections and overall voice,” writes Nelson Carvajal at RogerEbert.com. “Consider: this year’s festival’s poster (created by Jorge Pomareda) depicts a strip of motion picture film stock bursting through what is obviously the Mexican border, hammering home the idea that no wall or obstruction (or Administration for that matter) can keep out the compelling voices and stories coming from Latin America. Running from April 5 through April 19 at the AMC River East 21 movie theatre in downtown Chicago, the thirty-fourth Chicago Latino Film Festival looks to once again be the beacon of light for the Latino artistic community.”

Cambridge.Wim Wenders will be at the Harvard Film Archive on Saturday to present Paris, Texas (1984) and then on Sunday for the screening of Wings of Desire (1987). “Paris, Texas is an almost impossibly perfect title for a film that filters Western iconography through the distinctly European lenses of Wenders and his brilliant cinematographer Robby Müller,” writes Sean Burns for WBUR. As for Wings of Desire, “who wouldn’t want to quit their job and run off to join the circus with [Solveig] Dommartin?”

Seattle.Future//Present: Canada’s New Wave is on through Sunday at Northwest Film Forum, subject of the latest episode of Art-House America, now streaming on the Criterion Channel on FilmStruck. “I have seen three of the eight films in this program, and what impressed me was not only the raw energy of these works but also how they presented Canadians,” writes Charles Mudede in the Stranger.

Baltimore.Mary Reid Kelley and Patrick Kelley: We Are Ghosts is now on at the Baltimore Museum of Art through August 19. Harry Thorne for frieze: “Mary and Patrick’s films are post-mortem parodies: disjointed variations on a theme that sees repetition deployed at an ironic remove. Under a metahistorical guise, they pounce upon the various hidden tyrannies of the contemporary age and, in making them equal parts legible and ludicrous, unveil their deep-set problematics.”

Durham. The twenty-first Full Frame Documentary Film Festival has opened today, and it runs through Sunday. Women and Hollywood is still interviewing directors:

• Laura Green and Anna Moot-Levin,The Providers
• Roopa Gogineni,I Am Bisha
• Allison Bohl DeHart,Bending Lines: The Sculpture of Robert Wiggs
• Anais Huerta,David. The Return to Land
• Celia Peterson,The Good Struggle
• Laura Nix,Inventing Tomorrow

Toronto. TIFF Cinematheque presents Jacques Demy’s The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (1964) tonight, and Chris Cummings, a.k.a. Marker Starling, writes: “One major source of the film’s power is Michel Legrand’s perfectly calibrated score, which yielded two themes that became jazz standards of the era: ‘I Will Wait For You,’ based on the most famous melody associated with Umbrellas, ‘Je ne pourrai jamais vivre sans toi’ (‘I could never live without you’); and ‘Watch What Happens,’ derived from the film’s ‘Récit de Cassard,’ whose title refers to the reoccurring character of Roland Cassard (Marc Michel), who first appeared in Demy’s rapturous debut Lola (1961) and in Umbrellas agrees to marry the pregnant Geneviève to save her petit bourgeois family from scandal. . . . The film’s sympathetic handling of Cassard (rather than making him a stock villain) attests to what makes Demy’s filmic universe so singular: no character is treated shabbily, none is present merely to serve a plot function.”

London.Modern Westerns is a modest program running alongside the BFI’s Sergio Leone season this month, and Nicole Davis writes: “This new wave of westerns has by no means reduced the sense of peril that women face in occupying such a landscape . . . However they have provided a female perspective and a sense of identity that’s more fluid than the fixed and circumscribed roles we’ve seen before. Perhaps most importantly, they depict women, at once tough and tender, who are more than capable of holding their own.”

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