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Digging Into the Cannes Lineup, Sight Unseen: Heavy on English Movies and Light on Women
The Cannes Film Festival is more than a month away, but now that we know most of the official selection, we can draw a few conclusions about the mix.
That’s what’s so encouraging about the inclusion of names like Andrea Arnold (whose “Bird” sounds a lot like her earlier “Fish Tank”) and Sean Baker (about whose “Anora” hardly anything is known), who represent a younger generation of art-house voices. That makes it especially surprising that Cannes has added so few new Asian auteurs to its ranks over the last decade — and only one in competition: Chinese master Jia Zhangke’s “Caught by the Tides,” starring his wife and muse, Zhao Tao. That’s not meant to exclude Indian filmmaker Payal Kapadia or Abbasi or Serebrennikov, but the takeaway remains: The festival’s leadership role in identifying great work from China, Japan, Thailand, Korea and other countries has suffered enormously since the days when Pierre Rissient was scouting the region.
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