By Hindustan Times
From the winners of the much-coveted awards to the official Indian entries at Cannes, we present to you the most productive the celebrated film festival has to provide and why you should not miss them.
1. Amour or Love (Palme d' Or winner): Amour is a sweetly tragic tale of an elderly couple in France. A duo of octogenarian actors bowled Cannes over as a loyal husband and his dying wife in a wrenching cinematic study of affection on the bitter end by Palme d'Or winner Michael Haneke.
Love, incidentally, was also the favorite among Cannes critics, who had given the movie the top selection of stars, and it seemed in a very long time that the jury and journalists were at the same wave length. It also marks the primary time a filmmaker has won back to back Palms so quickly.
2. The Angel’s Share (Jury Prize winner): British master Ken Loach’s The Angel’s Share is a beautiful piece of cinema a couple of young father whose new-born son proves a turning point in his lifetime of petty crime.
This year, his The Angel’s Share was a part of the 22-film Competition lineup. This movie, popping out of a partnership between Loach and writer Paul Laverty, is likely one of the best from the director’s stable. It's warm, it's witty and, despite the ethical issues it throws up, The Angel’s Share ends on note of hope and happiness.
About Britain’s generation of young women and men struggling to seek out their bread and butter, Loach’s work often looks like a fairy tale that ends well. And it's peppered with delightful humour, sweet sentiment and fair play. As one critic said, “The Angels’ Share deftly balances heartbreak and hilarity to supply a cheering, feel good ray of hope from what often appear to be the bleakest of lives.”
The very talked-about British director, Ken Loach, has screened 11 of his movies on the Cannes Film Festival. No other helmer holds this record. What's more, all his 11 movies played within the coveted Competition, along with his 2006 The Wind that Shakes the Barley clinching the highest Palm d’Or.
3. Reality (Grand Prix winner): Luciano is a Neapolitan fishmonger who supplements his modest income by pulling off little scams along with his wife Maria. A likeable, entertaining guy, Luciano never misses a chance to accomplish for his customers and countless relatives. Sooner or later his family urge him to take a look at out for giant Brother. In chasing this dream his perception of reality begins to change.
Matteo Garrone won the celebrated Grand Prix award for this film.
4. Posterior Lucia (Un Certain Regard winner): Michel Franco's film is set a lady Alejandra and her dad Roberto, who've just moved to town. She is new in school and he has a brand new job. Starting over is typically complicated if in case you have left such a lot behind.
The film winning the Un Certain Regard award symbolises it having an original aim and aesthetic.
5. Rust and Bone: Marion Cotillard’s wonderfully arresting performance as a killer whale trainer in Jacques Audiard’s Rust and Bone is being tossed around because the clincher within the acting category.
One of the contest entries on the ongoing 65th Cannes Film Festival is Jacques Audiard’s Rust and Bone in French. That is probably the most nicest movies I'VE seen till now at this 12-day event at the French Riviera. Audiard has created a large canvas through the years: his A Self-Made Hero probed revisionist history, tackled love between a former convict and almost deaf woman in Read My Lips and walked into the murky corridors of a French prison in A Prophet, which clinched an Oscar nod for the most productive Foreign Language Picture. The true trophy didn't come its way.
In his latest, a Cannes Competition entry, Rust and Bone, Audiard gets the ravishing Marion Cotillard to play a girl who trains killer whales (the passions people have!). In love and living along with her boyfriend, she becomes the centre of a brawl in a club one night, and needs to be rescued by the financially- broke boxer doubling up as a bouncer there, Matthias Schoenaerts.
6. Beyond the Hills: Garnering more stars from critics than Rust and Bone was Christian Mungiu’s Beyond the Hills. It would not be more apt for it comes at a time when the rift between religious-superstition and secular pragmatism is deepening. That is glaring in India. Directed by the gifted Romania’s Cristian Mungiu (whose abortion drama, 4 months, 3 Weeks and a couple of Days won the Palm d’Or at Cannes many years ago), Beyond the Hills unfolds in a remote monastery, where there's no electricity, no running water and little trace of modernism. Headed by a neighborhood priest, the Orthodox monastery houses an order of young nuns, who call the person papa.
7. Moonrise Kingdom: Wes Anderson’s Moonrise Kingdom, about two runaway kids who choose to get married, gave the impression to be within the ring – just like Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris, also a Cannes opener, was last year.
Moonrise Kingdom was filmed on an island in New England, and narrates tormented days in the summertime of 1965. More specifically this is a story of 2 young lovers running clear of their town, with the local sheriff and the girl’s parents in hot pursuit. Looks as if it has all of the masala of Mumbai!
With its heavy-weight cast of Hollywood A-listers, the film also contributed to a blinding opening night red carpet. Bruce Willis, Bill Murray, Ed Norton and Tilda Swinton posed amicably.
India Connect:
8. Miss Lovely (Un Certain Regard nominee): An Indian movie has made it to the 65th Cannes Film Festival. Ashim Ahluwalia’s Miss Lovely could be a part of the A UNDENIABLE Regard, with about 20 entries. Set within the Mumbai of the mid-1980s, Miss Lovely is a narrative of sleaze and suspicion. Two brothers, Vicky and Sonu, make C-grade movies, and fall in love with the similar woman. Miss Lovely stars Nawazuddin Siddiqui, Niharika Singh and Anil George.
Ahluwalia distances himself from traditional Bollywood but has a fascination with elements of Indian cinema: his "very gritty and dark" film depicts the sleazy world of 1980s "C" grade Hindi movies. "I USED TO BE desirous about the lower depths of the industry, individuals who make cheap films at the margins -- sex horror films, bandit films," he told AFP.
9. Gangs of Wasseypur (Directors' Fortnight section): Anurag Kashyap directed the longest-running entry within the festival, Gangs of Wasseypur, a five hour and 20 minute film he describes as "a Bollywood-influenced gangster epic, part Western, part documentary. "With a folk-meets-dubstep soundtrack and a basis in true stories, the film follows three generations of coal and scrap-trade mafia gangs in a suburb in east India who're obsessive about traditional Hindi cinema.
“It’s an epic drama by which we've got fictionalised the facts. The universal appeal of the topic attracted me so much. It’s a global that India hasn't ever before seen at the big screen. On second thoughts, I ASSUME nobody has,” says Anurag Kashyap concerning the film.
10. Peddlers (Camera d'Or nominee): Vasan Bala's is ready a ghost town, Mumbai, that is inhabited by millions. A WOMAN on a mission, a person living a lie, an aimless drifter. They collide. Some collisions are of consequence, some not, either ways town moves at the. film have been produced by Anurag Kashyap.
Peddlers was showcased on the Cannes Critics' Week and compete for the distinguished Camera d'Or.
