Cannes 2022 Lineup

A celebrity couple, a party of billionaires, and a savvy cleaning lady are stranded on a desert island when the yacht captained by a committed Marxist (Woody Harrelson) sinks in Ruben Östlund’s Triangle of Sadness. In Tarik Saleh’s Boy from Heaven, the sudden death of a grand imam sets off a power struggle at a university in Cairo. So far, the only Italian film selected for the competition is Mario Martone’s Nostalgia, an adaptation of Ermanno Rea’s 2016 novel about a man who returns to Rione Sanità, his old neighborhood in Naples, after forty years.

Following years spent clashing with Russian authorities, Kirill Serebrennikov (Leto, Petrov’s Flu) has left the country and settled for the time being in Berlin. Tchaikovsky’s Wife, his latest feature, is the story of Antonina Miliukova, who suffered a mental breakdown after the composer married her and then blamed her for his writer’s block and general misery.

Serebrennikov is one of the directors Ukrainian filmmaker Sergei Loznitsa does not want to see cancelled simply because he’s Russian. Loznitsa’s archive documentary The Natural History of Destruction, inspired by W. G. Sebald’s writing on the Allied bombing of Germany in the Second World War, is one of three special screenings. The other two are Shaunak Sen’s All That Breathes, which won a grand jury prize at Sundance, and Jerry Lee Lewis: Trouble in Mind, a documentary from Ethan Coen, who’s going solo after his brother Joel did last year with The Tragedy of Macbeth.

Lee Jung-jae’s lead performance in the hit Netflix series Squid Game made him an international star, and his directorial debut, Hunt, will premiere as a midnight screening. Costarring and cowritten by Lee, Hunt tracks two special agents in Korea’s National Intelligence Service as they race to find a North Korean mole. Quentin Dupieux, whose Incredible But True premiered in Berlin in February, already has another feature, Smoking Makes You Cough. It centers on a group of vigilantes who call themselves the “tobacco forces.” And Brett Morgen, the director of the Kurt Cobain documentary Montage of Heck (2015), spent four years working with archival footage of David Bowie performances to create Moonage Daydream.

When the festival launched Cannes Premiere last year, the focus of Un Certain Regard zeroed in on the discovery of new talent. Seven of the fifteen UCR titles selected so far are debut features, including Beast. Actress Riley Keough (American Honey, Zola) has teamed up with producer Gina Gammell to tell the interrelated stories of three Lakota men living on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota.

Known quantities in the UCR program include Agnieszka Smoczyńska (The Lurę), whose The Silent Twins tells the true story of June and Jennifer Gibbons, identical twins from the only Black family in a small town in Wales. Smoczyńska’s first feature in English stars Letitia Wright and Tamara Lawrance. Hlynur Pálmason (Winter Brothers; A White, White Day) sets Godland in the late nineteenth century, when a young Danish priest travels to a remote region of Iceland to build a church.

A prosecutor is drawn into a small town’s political wrangling in Burning Days, the latest feature from Turkish director Emin Alper, whose films have won awards in Berlin and Venice. Davy Chou (Golden Slumbers, Diamond Island) traces a twenty-five-year-old French woman’s search for her biological parents in Seoul in All the People I’ll Never Be. And Vicky Krieps plays Empress Elisabeth of Austria, struggling against her own idealized image, in Marie Kreutzer’s Corsage.

In the Cannes Premiere program, Olivier Assayas will offer a first sampling of Irma Vep, a limited series adaptation of his 1996 film, itself a riff on Louis Feuillade’s classic silent film serial Les Vampires. This latest iteration features Alicia Vikander, Carrie Brownstein, and Jerrod Carmichael. And after Broken Dreams (1995), a documentary about the kidnapping of former Italian prime minister Aldo Moro by the Red Brigades in 1978, and Good Morning, Night (2003), a fictionalization of the event, Marco Bellocchio returns to the story with Outside Night.

In 2019, Cannes opened with a zombie comedy, Jim Jarmusch’s The Dead Don’t Die. This year, the festival will open with Michel Hazanavicius’s zombie comedy, Z (comme Z), which will likely be released in the U.S. as Final Cut. The remake of Shin’ichiro Ueda’s One Cut of the Dead (2017), in which the cast and crew working on a low-budget zombie movie are attacked by actual zombies, stars Romain Duris and Bérénice Bejo.

Also premiering out of competition are Top Gun: Maverick, Baz Luhrmann’s Elvis, Cédric Jimenez’s November, Nicolas Bedos’s Masquerade—and George Miller’s highly anticipated Three Thousand Years of Longing, starring Tilda Swinton and Idris Elba as a scholar and a Djinn talking about life, the universe, and everything in a hotel room in Istanbul.