Ioncinema

All DJs, Great and Small: Unkovski’s Debut Can’t Stop the Music

While its location might feel inherently unique, the happenings in Georgi M. Unkovski’s narrative debut DJ Ahmet sing a familiar tune. A coming-of-age trajectory defined by the formidable temptation of forbidden love fostered through the life-changing possibilities of music, this tale of a teen torn between tradition and self-fulfillment in Northern Macedonia feels overtly accessible for those satisfied with the familiar and the formulaic. Dealing specifically with a young Yuruk boy, a Turkic ethnic subgroup spread across the Balkan Peninsula, a local community festival provides the dramatic zenith as an act of rebellion towards the rigid expectations imposed upon a youthful generation faced with following the proscribed designs of their parents.… Read the rest

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Welcome back to the second portion of our Cannes Film Festival Competition predictions. Earlier we had ten titles jostling among our prognostications; today we add sixteen more. Enjoy the list below, share it among peers, and make sure to join us on April 9th as we comment on all the Cannes Film Festival selections.

Everything
Sandra Wollner
Producers: Panama Film’s Lixi Frank, David Bohun, Viktoria Stolpe, Sandra Wollner.
World Sales: TBD.

If the past few editions have proved us anything, it’s that fresh voices with no Cannes history can pierce the line-up — Thierry Frémaux has been surreptitiously ading new female auteur voices in his previous line-ups with the likes of Ramata-Toulaye Sy, Agathe Riedinger, and now we’re betting on a Mascha Schilinski Sound of Falling surprise inclusion for this prediction.… Read the rest

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Welcome back to the second portion of our Cannes Film Festival Competition predictions. Earlier we had ten titles jostling among our prognostications; today we add sixteen more. Enjoy the list below, share it among peers, and make sure to join us on April 9th as we comment on all the Cannes Film Festival selections.

Everything
Sandra Wollner
Producers: Panama Film’s Lixi Frank, David Bohun, Viktoria Stolpe, Sandra Wollner.
World Sales: TBD.

If the past few editions have proved us anything, it’s that fresh voices with no Cannes history can pierce the line-up — Thierry Frémaux has been surreptitiously ading new female auteur voices in his previous line-ups with the likes of Ramata-Toulaye Sy, Agathe Riedinger, and now we’re betting on a Mascha Schilinski Sound of Falling surprise inclusion for this prediction.… Read the rest

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With over a dozen acting credits (she began as a teenager) under her belt most notably works with Sebastián Lelio, Martín Rejtman and Andrés Wood’s Machuca (which premiered at the Directors’ Fortnight in 2005), Chilean filmmaker Manuela Martelli‘s first short film efforts Apnea (2014) and Land Tides (2015) which premiered at the Directors’ Fortnight the same Cannes section that welcome her back to world premiere her feature debut 1976 in 2022. The possible thematic strategy appears to include thematic element of disappearance and the backdrop or sentiment of Chile’s Pinochet dictatorship. Here is everything we know so far … for Manuela Martelli‘s The Meltdown (El deshielo)

Slowly chipping away at funding with prizing at 2022’s Ventana Sur and 2023’s Torino Film Lab, production would have taken place in late 2024.… Read the rest

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In less than two weeks, Thierry Frémaux will unveil the (never 100% complete but always tantalizingly close) lineup for the 79th edition of the Cannes Film Festival. Sure, the trades have intel, but there’s plenty of speculation too—titles long thought ready might still be absent, films everyone assumed were shoe-ins could have quietly accepted an offer from Alberto Barbera, and then there are the real puzzle pieces: “Wait, this got selected?” or “I didn’t even know this existed!” and “I guess Terrence Malick is still editing – sigh”. Normally the total number of selections will situate around 19 to 21 feature mark and as of late we can officially cross the name of Ruben Östlund off from this year’s bingo card.… Read the rest

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Break My Soul: Lapid Explores Compromised Artistry During Wartime

Essentially, YES, the latest film from Israeli auteur Nadav Lapid, is a portrait of an artist as a compromised man. Its innocuous title is essentially a rebuke of a contemporary reality relating to submission as the only real truth of the world. Collectively and individually, we no longer have the luxury of saying ‘no.’ Resistance is futile, we must comply. Destined for instant controversy and an eventual time capsule documenting Israel’s normalizing of barbarism, Lapid’s latest is an admonition of almost shocking import, an increasingly rare example of modern art speaking truth to power.… Read the rest

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Can You Ever Forgive Me?: Jude Skewers the Status Quo

Ownership is an unsaid key word in Kontinental ’25, the latest perambulating spasm from Romanian director Radu Jude, which navigates an intersection of self-accountability, property, language, and culture as precarious notions in a nation bulldozing itself into capitalism’s future. A more omnipresent notion is guilt, mainly regarding its main protagonist, an empathetic bailiff who finds her world turned upside down when a homeless man she was in the process of evicting commits suicide. What follows is an endless parade of guilt performance as a way to reach absolution, perhaps more so in a public realm than the personal.… Read the rest

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Turn to Stone: Ducournau Hits a Wall with Disease Allegory

“Death is the cure for all illness,” wrote English writer Thomas Browne, which is a sentiment one can apply to Alpha, the third film from budding body horror extraordinaire Julia Ducournau—for the end credits at last release one from its tightly wound, nonsensical battering. Ducournau’s Palme d’Or winning Titane (read review) was destined to be a hard act to follow, and the anxiety to provide a similar sense of howling wonder is apparent in almost every aspect of a fragmented allegory about diseases, both social and physical. An ambiguously troubled teen gets a tattoo while drunk at a party, an event which sends both herself and her painstakingly empathetic mother into an immediate psychotic break.… Read the rest

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Before we dive headfirst into full-on Palme d’Or predictions tomorrow (with a part deux that will drop brunch time on Sunday) – we now look at the items that Thierry Frémaux would have possibly looked at (and secured) for the Out of Competition, Midnight, Special Screenings and Cannes Premiere slots.

The Out of Competition slate usually runs a half-dozen strong, a mix of blockbuster studio tentpoles and quirky indie curiosities – (how many people had Amélie Bonnin’s feature debut Partir un jour on their bingo card?). Midnight screenings—always the wild cards—tend to stick to a fivesome and lean heavily on genre thrills, chills, and adrenaline-soaked mischief.… Read the rest

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Introduced in 1978 by Gilles Jacob, the Un Certain Regard sidebar typically presents around twenty films championing distinctive styles and unconventional storytelling. In recent years, the section has increasingly shifted toward spotlighting emerging filmmakers—those still early in their careers, from debut features to relatively new voices. The Cannes Premiere section now lands some of the more established auteurs. Last year’s lineup reflected that focus, with nine of the twenty selections marking feature debuts. Urchin, A Poet, My Father’s Shadow, Homebound and queer titles I Only Rest in the Storm and Pillion were part of the highlights nestled in the Salle Debussy.… Read the rest

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