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We call them “parallel sections”, these unofficial selections which fully participate in what is happening at Cannes, and are more accessible to ordinary spectators. Even if they never attract the news flashes like the official competition, they are privileged spaces of discovery, which have their part in the impact of the Cannes Festival as a whole.
The Filmmakers’ Fortnight, Critics’ Week and the ACID program (for Association of Independent Cinema for its Dissemination) together present around fifty new feature films – twenty-one, eighteen and nine titles respectively, including highly anticipated works.
They assert themselves from the outset with three very beautiful opening films, as successful as they are different from each other: My life my face by Sophie Fillières, Kyuka – Before Summer’s End by Kostis Charamountanis and The ghosts by Jonathan Millet.
“My life, my face” by Sophie Fillières
A double emotion immediately welcomes the seventh feature film from the director of Big Small (1994). Firstly because Sophie Fillières died without being able to complete it, on July 31, 2023, leaving her children the task of completing it entirely. And simultaneously because it is there, immediately on the screen.
We recognize the actress, obviously, Agnès Jaoui, absolutely remarkable in the film. But we also “recognize” the director, even without having ever seen her, as her intense and intimate presence saturates the screen, the words, the face.
Agnès Jaoui, overwhelming as Barbie, but especially as Sophie Fillières. | Day2party
This woman, who in the film is nicknamed Barbie, writes. She asks herself a question from the outset, which is in itself a small miracle of putting into play, in resonance, in echoes both playful and anguished. It’s because of the police. The font.
The police are not the cops, but… Characters are not psychology or feelings, but… The choice of said font sets off a formidable whirlwind of troubles, tragicomic concerns, misunderstandings a little grotesque where a magnificent poem emerges as if by miracle, where a chasm opens which leads straight to the internment hut. But not only…
That’s how it is, the song would say. This “like that” which touches on the discomfort of the filmmaker and that, in multiple ways, of humans, was the material for all of Sophie Fillières’ films. Sense of situations, dialogues, sensitive complicity with the actors and actresses were always there.
The concern could be, over the course of these endless obstacle courses towards a less worried existence, to go the distance. Here, and it is a marvel, the acquired speed (which does not necessarily need to be rapid) bounces from scene to scene, in varied registers and colors.
It’s funny. It’s sad. It’s sad and funny. It’s lively throughout, with the precision of a tightrope walker and the confidence of a child who plays the game completely. There was the emotion at the beginning, it is increased tenfold when the film reaches the end of its journey, with modest finesse and where a strange word flourishes: honest. It’s not common.
“Kyuka – Before Summer’s End” by Kostis Charamountanis
First feature film by a Greek director, Kyuka immediately impresses with its way of making seemingly banal everyday moments come alive and vibrant. Two young people, a boy and a girl who we only gradually learn are twins, go on vacation with their father on a sailboat, mooring in a port on a Greek island.
Between the two of them, with the taciturn father, or during meetings on the port or at the beach, small scenes play out, always with astonishing accuracy, which distill multiple emotions, between humor and worry, everyday life and mystery. .
Under the sun of a Greek island, a reunion less fortuitous than it seems. | Heretic
It is only the beginning of a film which will then, around a broader story and less on the surface of the days than it seemed, deploy with great inventiveness multiple resources of cinematographic language.
Several dramas intertwine in a Gordian knot which concerns self-images, identity, the nature of possible links and belongings suffered or desired, according to a crescendo staged with admirable freedom of realization.
It’s joyful and cruel, strange and close. It takes a rather rare kind of audacity, perhaps partly linked to the fact of being a first film, to knead the material in this way, to sculpt it in a way that is never gratuitous, in the service of emotions and implicits. We hope that Kyuka will then find its way to theaters, and we are already waiting for Charamountanis’ second film.
“The Ghosts” by Jonathan Millet
Another first film, another discovery. Jonathan Millet’s feature film is a film with burning issues linked to contemporary history, and also a great cinematic proposition.
The ghosts of the title are both these Syrians who had to flee to Europe from the dictatorship of Bashar al-Assad, the latter’s henchmen infiltrated among the emigrants, and the hundreds of thousands of victims of the crushing of the liberation movement Syrian.
Hamid (Adam Bessa), investigator haunted by a tragedy. | Memento Films
The latter will remain off-screen in this film almost entirely located between Eastern France and Germany, but they haunt the uncertain spaces where the former stalk the latter, and are stalked by them.
Filled with fury inspired by the atrocious fate of his loved ones, Hamid joined the clandestine organization which attempts to identify and neutralize, by legal or illegal means, the torturers of Damascus established in Europe. This strength alone would be sufficient for a high-level contemporary thriller, which in fact is The ghosts.
But the film is also nourished by the complexity of the motivations of the different protagonists, the effects of the uncertainty of the identity of each person, and the legitimacy of the means to be used.
The multiplicity of these lines of tension could weigh down the film. This is not the case, thanks to the intensity of the actors, in particular Hamid’s interpreter, Adam Bessa, and the one he tirelessly follows, Tawfeek Barhom.
And also thanks to a staging which places great emphasis on sensations, touch and smell, but also finds, from Beirut to Berlin, an astonishing form of tense fluidity. This is particularly true of the shadowing scenes in Strasbourg, the success of which, on a motif that is both very often filmed and which can quickly become boring, is decisive in giving all its strength to this production.
