A fierce hijab girl, a Vietnamese pilgrimage, a Scorsese-DiCaprio team up and a new Cate Blanchett drama, Cannes Film Festival opens today with an eclectic taste of world cinema.
Tiger Stripes
Directed by Amanda Nell Eu
This Malaysian film in the Critics' Week section is one of the two Southeast Asian titles in Cannes 2023 (the other is described below) and is already celebrated as a fierce leap in contemporary Malaysian cinema. Writer-director Amanda Nell Eu crafts a tale of uneasy pubescence in Zaffan, a hijab-wearing 12-year-old girl who discovers a transformative secret about her own body amidst the suspicion of her family and friends. The promo picture says it all. Last year, the Critics' Week yielded one of 2022's best films, Charlotte Wells' Aftersun, a true discovery that confirmed this sidebar section as a vital launch pad for new talent.
Inside The Yellow Cocoon Shell
Directed by Thein An Pham
This 182-minute Vietnamese film by Thien An Pham follows a man on a pilgrimage to his hometown in the hinterland, where he reconnects with the phantom of his own past in the remote Christian village. Inside The Yellow Cocoon Shell will be screened in the Directors' Fortnight section, a fertile soil for adventurous filmmaking. This film and Tiger Stripes (above) show that young Southeast Asian directors -- not necessarily from Thailand -- are on course for an exciting year.
Killers Of The Flower Moon
Directed by Martin Scorsese
Martin Scorsese won the Palme d'Or with Taxi Driver in 1976 -- and hasn't returned to the festival until now. Made with Apple TV, Killers Of The Flower Moon will have its world premiere in the Out Of Competition section (no pressure that way) and looks set to generate all the buzz necessary to carry it all the way to the Oscars season. Leonardo DiCaprio and Robert De Niro star in this 1920s crime story about the serial murders of the indigenous Osage people on their oil-rich Oklahoma land and the conspiracy behind white settlements in the disputed territory.
Monster
Directed by Hirokazu Kore-eda
Nearly every May, headline writers scribble this familiar sentence with both eyes closed, "Hirokazu Kore-eda is back in Cannes Competition". Because that's what he does, and what Cannes never shies of doing. Kore-eda has had six of his last nine films premiered at Cannes. He won the Palme d'Or with the heart-wrenching Shoplifters in 2018, returned last year with the baby-stealing caper Broker, and this year he has Monster, another family drama revolving around a mother whose son starts behaving strangely and a schoolteacher who might be responsible for all the trouble. Thai audiences will see it in cinemas soon.
Cobweb
Directed by Kim Jee-woon
Cannes has a habit of not passing up any new Korean film starring Song Kang-ho (Parasite, among many others). In this film-within-a-film story showing in the Out Of Competition, Song plays a film director obsessed with reshooting his own film while the crew are left befuddled as to what the script is really about. Director Kim Jee-woon (of the actual film) has been a reliable stalwart since the early 2000s from films such as A Tale Of Two Sisters, I Saw The Devil, and The Good, The Bad, The Weird.
Qing Chun
Directed by Wang Bing
Wang Bing in Cannes Competition! Every year Cannes smuggles in at least one wild card title from the edge of arthouse wilderness, for shock effect and a semblance of radicalism, and for the 2023 edition, it's the Chinese artist and experimental filmmaker Wang Bing's Qing Chun. Wang's gritty, hard-edged chronicles of the small towns of modern China and its young population are well known both among film audiences and the visual art community for nearly two decades. Not much is known about the three-and-a-half-hour Qing Chun, though it's likely to be a continuation of his installation work 15 Hours shown at Documenta 2017.
The Zone Of Interest
Directed by Jonathan Glazer
Based on the 2014 novel by Martin Amis (austere and sardonic), this British film by the director of Under The Skin was reportedly shot in Auschwitz and follows a Nazi commander, his wife and a low-ranking camp officer who falls in love with his boss' wife. The "love story" set amidst the stench of corpses and horrific moral decay gives the book its strange, bitter pull, and Jonathan Glazer will be expected to deliver the same punch for the film. The Zone Of Interest is screened in Competition and stars Sandra Huller and Christian Friedel.
Ran Dong
Directed by Anthony Chen
Singaporean Anthony Chen is probably the country's internationally best-known director of the past many years. He won the Camera d'Or at Cannes in 2013 for his first film, the sensitive domestic-worker drama Ilo Ilo. In this latest film showing in the Un Certain Regard section, Chen moves his setup to the subzero climate in a border town in northern China, where three characters meet and bond over booze as they struggle to fight off loneliness worsened by the cold.
The New Boy
Directed by Warwick Thornton
Cate Blanchett, fresh from of her triumph as Lydia Tar, stars in this Australian film set in the 1940s. One night, a nine-year-old Aboriginal boy arrives at a remote monastery run by a renegade nun. The boy's presence disturbs the delicately balanced world in this story of spiritual struggle and the cost of survival. The film is showing in the Un Certain Regard section.
Eureka
Directed by Lisandro Alonso
A new film from the Argentinean filmmaker is always an event for cinephiles. There's no point deciphering the synopsis: a police officer in the US is fed up with her work and flies to South America, where she hears people's dreams and vows to stop watching old cowboy movies "that do not represent herself", but birds do not talk to humans. Showing in Cannes Premiere, Eureka seems like a mesmerising curio.
Kong Rithdee is deputy director of Thai Film Archive. He covers the Cannes Film Festival for the Bangkok Post.
