Cannes Adds Sixteen Films

When Jennifer Lawrence sent Ramsay a copy of Argentine writer Ariana Harwicz’s debut novel, Die, My Love—with Martin Scorsese on board as a producer—moved to the front burner. Profiling Robert Pattinson for the New York Times last month, Nick Haramis noted that “Lawrence plays a version of Harwicz’s unnamed narrator, a young mother with postpartum psychosis who, in the book, daydreams about killing herself and her family; Pattinson, her husband in the film, says it’s ‘hilarious.’” The cast also features LaKeith Stanfield, Sissy Spacek, and Nick Nolte.

The other addition to the main competition is Saeed Roustaee’s Woman and Child, starring Payman Maadi, Parinaz Izadyar, and Soha Niasti. Roustaee’s Leila’s Brothers won the FIPRESCI Prize when it premiered in competition in 2022, and one year later, the Islamic Revolutionary Court in Tehran sentenced Roustaee and his producer, Javad Noruzbegi, to six months in prison for “participating in the opposition’s propaganda against the Islamic regime.” Both served nine days of their sentence, with the remainder suspended for five years.

In Woman and Child, a forty-five-year-old nurse and single mother is about to marry her boyfriend when her son is expelled from school. A horrific accident then sparks her quest for justice.

Of the four titles added to the Un Certain Regard program, one is a first feature. Along with all the other debuts premiering in the Official Selection, Critics’ Week, or Directors’ Fortnight, Kristen Stewart’s The Chronology of Water will be eligible for the Camera d’Or presented by a jury presided over this year by Alice Rohrwacher. 

Adapted from Lidia Yuknavitch’s 2011 memoir, Chronology stars Imogen Poots as Yuknavitch, whose struggles with addiction dashed her hopes for a career as a swimmer. She has since become a critically acclaimed writer. “In all of her work, sex, violence, and art are inextricably linked,” writes Garth Greenwell in the New Yorker, adding that “the genuinely subversive and challenging aspect of Yuknavitch’s work is her foregrounding of the body, and especially her presentation of sex.”

In Simón Mesa Soto’s A Poet, an aging Colombian begins to realize that his obsession with poetry has led to a dead end. His life turns around, though, when he takes a budding young poet under his wing. In Pedro Pinho’s I Only Rest in the Storm, an environmental engineer working with an NGO on a project in Africa becomes entangled in the complex dynamics of the expat community. And Vicky Krieps stars in Anna Cazenave Cambet’s Love Me Tender as a lawyer who quits to become a writer—and to come out. Her ex-husband is determined to win custody of their son.

Since the noncompetitive Cannes Premiere section was introduced in 2021, its identity has remained a little fuzzy, but three very promising films have been added to this year’s edition. In Koji Fukada’s Love on Trial, rising J-Pop idol Mai has a “no relationship” clause in her contract, so naturally, when she does fall in love, her very public life spins out of control.

Hlynur Pálmason, whose Godland (2022) premiered in the Un Certain Regard program, returns to the festival with The Love That Remains, which captures a year in the life of a family as the parents navigate their separation. Gael García Bernal stars in Lav Diaz’s Magellan as the Portuguese explorer who died in the Philippines in 1521. “Being a Filipino Malay, I wanted to show more of our part of the story,” Diaz tells Rappler’s Ruben V. Nepales.

Director Ethan Coen and cowriter Tricia Cooke introduced themselves as a husband-and-wife team last year with Drive-Away Dolls, and they’re already back with Honey Don’t! Margaret Qualley stars as Honey O’Donahue, a private investigator looking into a series of deaths somehow related to a mysterious church. The cast also features Aubrey Plaza, Charlie Day, Billy Eichner, and Chris Evans.

In the wee hours of the morning at a rundown bar outside of Paris, a customer discovers that he’s holding a winning lottery ticket worth 244 million euros in Vincent Maël Cardona’s Le Roi Soleil. But then another customer steals a gun from a police officer, and suddenly, that ticket has no owner. Spotting an opportunity, the remaining regulars glance at each other, draw the curtains, and hash it out.

All four new Special Screenings are first features. Maïlys Vallade and Liane-Cho Han’s animated Amélie et la Métaphysique des tubes is based on Amélie Nothomb’s short novel from 2000. The story is told from the point of view of a three-year-old born to Belgian diplomats in Japan. Another animated feature, Arco, is directed by comics artist Ugo Bienvenu and tells the story of a boy who uses rainbows to travel through time. One day, he veers off course and becomes stuck in 2075. The voice cast is led by Alma Jodorowsky, Swann Arlaud, Vincent Macaigne, Louis Garrel, and rapper Oxmo Puccino.

Or Sinai, who won the festival’s Cinefondation Award in 2016, will present Mama, a film that “digs deep into the female psyche under the magnification of the female gaze,” according to producer Kathleen McInnis. Mélanie Laurent and Pierre-Yves Cardinal star in Joséphine Japy’s The Wonderers, the story of a family dealing with the severe disability of the youngest of two daughters.

As part of its tribute to Pierre Richard, the filmmaker and actor best known for starring in such comedies as The Tall Blond Man with One Black Shoe (1972), Cannes will present the ninety-year-old’s L’homme qui a vu l’ours qui a vu l’homme, directed by and starring himself. Two men who wouldn’t normally have much to do with each other band together to find a bear that has escaped from a circus.

Cannes 2025 will open on May 13 and run through May 24. There are two posters this year, each depicting—from opposite angles—the same embrace of Jean-Louis Trintignant and Anouk Aimée in Claude Lelouch’s A Man and a Woman, the winner of the Palme d’Or in 1966.