News from Cannes, Venice, Sundance, and Berlin
Before we turn to the Berlinale’s sneak peeks at its 2020 lineup, we’ve got news from Cannes, Venice, Sundance, and Los Angeles to see to. Spike Lee will preside over the jury at Cannes, and in a statement accompanying the announcement, he traces his history with the festival from the Directors’ Fortnight screening of his debut feature, She’s Gotta Have It (1986), through the premiere in competition of Do the Right Thing (1989) to the Grand prix for BlacKkKlansman in 2018. He also adds that he’s “honored to be the first person of the African diaspora (USA) to be named President of the Cannes jury.” At Little White Lies, Charles Bramesco predicts that “the grandiloquent Lee can be counted on to drop a few memorable soundbites, and moreover, he’ll bring the spirit of Bed-Stuy to the stuffy banks of the Cote d’Azur.” Cannes’s seventy-third edition will run from May 12 through 23.
- Last and First Man is the sole feature directed by the late Icelandic composer Jóhann Jóhannsson (Sicario, Arrival). Shot in black and white on 16 mm by Norwegian cinematographer Sturla Brandth Grøvlen, the project began as a multimedia presentation examining war monuments throughout the Balkans. The film will be narrated by Tilda Swinton.
- Three Chinese novelists discuss the literature and history of the past seven decades in Jia Zhangke’s documentary Swimming Out to Sea Till the Sea Turns Blue.
- Johnny Depp will play the renowned photographer W. Eugene Smith in Andrew Levitas’s Minamata. The story focuses on Smith’s exposure of the devastation wrought on a Japanese coastal town by the negligence of a local chemical factory.
- Nanette Burstein’s Hillary, a documentary set to premiere at Sundance, is a portrait of one of the most divisive figures in contemporary American politics, Hillary Clinton.
- Chazelle directs the first two episodes of The Eddy, a musical drama for Netflix starring André Holland (Moonlight), Joanna Kulig (Cold War), Amandla Stenberg (The Hunger Games), and Tahar Rahim (A Prophet) and set in a jazz club in Paris.
- Tsangari promises a merging of “television with cinema, drama with screwball comedy” in Trigonometry, a rom-com centering on a London couple who take in a roomie to help pay the rent.
- Blanchett stars alongside Yvonne Strahvoski (The Handmaid’s Tale) and Dominic West (The Wire) in Stateless, the six-part drama she’s cocreated that’s set in a detention center in the Australian desert.
- Warwick Thornton (Sweet Country) and Wayne Blair (The Sapphires) direct another Australian drama, Mystery Road 2, in which Detective Jay Swan (Aaron Pedersen) takes on a grisly case in a small town.
- Jason Segel’s Dispatches from Elsewhere features Sally Field, André Benjamin, and Richard E. Grant in a story centering on an institute that has created an alternative environment that may not be as magical as it first appears.
- In C’est comme ça que je t’aime (Happily Married), a series set in Quebec in 1974, two couples cope with life without their kids once they’ve sent them off to summer camp.
- Marvin Kren’s Freud will be the first Netflix original series from Austria. Set in Vienna in 1886, the story tracks the future father of psychoanalysis as he teams up with an unstable police commissioner and a strange medium to hunt down a serial killer.
- Twenty-two-year-old Cathrine’s gotta have it in Sex, a Danish series created by Clara Mendes and directed by Amalie Næsby Fick.