Cannes 2014 Day 1: Girlhood, A Hijack & Sabine Azéma

Bande De Filles at Director's Fortnight

And so I'm back at the Cannes Film Festival again. This is my third visit in a row after a fourteen years hiatus  and I simply cannot imagine not going back every year now. Yes it is exhausting, crazy, frustrating, but also, an experience like no others, where each day brings its share of surprises, glamour, chance encounters and of course great cinema. For all its madness, it is also a celebration of cinema in all its variety in a way that simply does not exist anywhere else in the world. The sheer concentration of talent, journalists, industry people, and cinephiles is insane, and make you feel like you are in a bubble, blissfully unaware of the outside world. Where else would people queue for hours and fight to watch a 3 hours + arthouse Turkish film, as happened to me today (more on this tomorrow!). But first thing first, and this is how my (short) first day went.

You And The Night: A Jean Rollin Electro Poem

As much as I like French cinema, one thing that has often been bothering me lately is its overt reliance on naturalism. Oh sure, it does it so well. But it is almost like all the film graduates from the grand old FEMIS cannot earn their stripes unless they go down that road. But where are the French Brian de Palma, Peter Greenaway, David Lynch, Apichatpong Weerasethakul even?... It is even more baffling considering how, within France itself, the new wave came up with such formally inventive films decades ago. I'm thinking Godard obviously, but also Alain Resnais, Jacques Rivette... Sure there has been a lot of genre films coming from France over the last decade, but they don't offer a great deal in term of formal experimentation (apart perhaps from Alexandre Bustillo & Julien Maury).

So this is why a film like You And The Night is so exciting to me, and feels like such a breath of fresh air, in the way it defies any modern conventions within French cinema.

Sundance London 2014: Talking Cats, Paul Rudd, Lo-Fi Sci-Fi And Wannabes

Paul Rudd & Amy Poehler in They Came Together

Bringing Sundance and its particular blend of independent cinema to London two years ago was a gamble, and yet it paid off handsomely. The festival has enjoyed a great success and recently had its third edition. It is proving yet again how cinephile London has become over the last decade or so, and the appetite there is for a wide range of films. And I like the opportunity this festival offers to catch up with a kind of American independent cinema which is actually hard to find, even in London, even if I can't help lamenting its short duration, and the fraction of films brought over.

Tracks - Epic Desert trek with Mia Wasikowska

The harshness and rugged beauty of the Australian desert is brilliantly shot in the amazing 'Tracks' from John Curran, staring Mia Wasikowska and Adam Driver. The true story of Robyn Davidson's bestselling 1980 novel 'Tracks' and her journey walking from Alice Springs to the Indian Ocean accompanied by four camels and a pet dog is a powerful story of her determination to pursue her dream.

An Episode in The Life of An Iron Picker - Meditative reality from Bosnia

Winner at the Berlin Film Festival 2013 (Silver Bear: Grand Jury Prix and Best Actor Nazif Mujic), An Episode in The Life of an Iron Picker is a gentle and though provoking film based on the real life events of a Romanian family living in rural Bosnia-Herzegovina.

The Last Days On Mars

Sci-fi films which concern themselves with the exploration of space (as opposed to merely being set in space) are far and few between, with Prometheus being the most recent incarnation. And yet, just like buses in London, after a long wait, three of them have just left the depot (or should it be the space station?). While we are waiting for the piece of resistance later in the year, Christopher Nolan's Interstellar, as an appetiser, two low-budget films have just been released, The Last Days On Mars and Europa Report.

Derek Jarman's Blue at the IMAX

I just love the way London has become so cinephile over the last decade, in a way that is a lot more vibrant, inventive and playful even than Paris, which might reign supreme as the city of cinema but is a little too reverential and serious for my liking. As yet another example, I attended the screening of Derek Jarman's Blue tonight, part of the pagan punk season at the BFI. And as a stroke of genius, the film was presented in the enormous screen of the IMAX, when you would have expected to see it in a much smaller screen, considering its perceived niche audience. Yet it was a crazy gamble that the programmers took which more than paid off, given than the screening was nearly full.