A universal languagethe latest film by Montrealer Matthew Rankin, was selected for the Cinematographers’ Fortnight, as part of the Cannes Film Festival.
The feature film, written and directed by Rankin, is set in his hometown of Winnipeg and his adopted city of Montreal. We follow the characters of Nazgol and Hossein, who want to help a friend find an Iranian bank note, as well as a protagonist, also called Matthew Rankin, who leaves Montreal to find his loved ones in Winnipeg.
The Filmmakers’ Fortnight, formerly called the Directors’ Fortnight, is a non-competitive selection which is organized in parallel with the Cannes Film Festival. It aims to discover “new talents” and is particularly receptive to “bold works”.
Quebec filmmaker Xavier Dolan made his first appearance at Cannes in this category for his film “I Killed My Mother” in 2009.
Matthew Rankin has earned several awards for his previous films. He notably won the trophy for best Canadian first feature film at the Toronto International Film Festival for The twentieth century. This film, released in 2019, was also awarded several times at the Canadian Screen Awards and the Québec Cinéma gala.
Rankin studied history, before being trained in the Cinema program of the National Institute of Image and Sound (INIS). He began his career making short films, several of which won awards.
A dinner with the children of Scorsese and Spielberg
On the French side, coach Julien Rejl announced at the opening My life, my facethe posthumous film by Sophie Fillières, a figure of auteur cinema who died last year, with Agnès Jaoui.
The Corsican Thierry de Peretti continues to explore the political history of his island (As his look), while Plastic gunsby Jean-Christophe Meurice, promises to revisit a news item in a trashy humor style with Jonathan Cohen, Nora Hamzawi, Vincent Dedienne, Thomas VDB or Aymeric Lompret.
Hafsia Herzi and Isabelle Huppert play a feminist duo in Patricia Mazuy (The prisoner of Bordeaux).
American independent cinema is back, with a film bringing together Michael Cera and descendants of Hollywood legends, Francesca Scorsese and Sawyer Spielberg (Christmas Eve In Miller’s Point by Tyler Taormina).
This parallel section, led by the Society of Film Directors (SRF), chose several films from countries where making cinema is a struggle.
Among them, the Argentinian Hernan Rosselli, “a worthy representative of a cinematography in danger” due to the policies of the ultraliberal Javier Milei, according to Julien Rejl, as well as a first Palestinian fiction by Mahdi Fleifel (To a Land Unknown), about two Palestinian cousins stuck in Athens who are looking for a scheme to reach Germany.
Also note an Egyptian film, East of Noon, signed Hala Elkoussy. Julien Rejl praised “the courage of this filmmaker because Egyptian censorship has never been so fierce against authors”.
With Agence Frrance-Presse