Cannes 2019. Directors' Fortnight Lineup

The lineup for the 2019 Directors' Fortnight (Quinzaine des Réalisateurs) at Cannes has been announced.
Notebook

The lineup for the 2019 Directors' Fortnight (Quinzaine des Réalisateurs) at Cannes has been announced. See also the full lineups of the Official SelectionCritics’ Week and ACID programme.

Opening Film:

Deerskin (Quentin Dupieux): A man who becomes obsessed with owning the designer deerskin jacket of his dreams. This obsession will lead him to turn his back on his humdrum life in the suburbs, blow his life savings and even turn him to crime.

Closing Film:

Yves (Benoît Forgeard): Jerem decides to settle at his grandma’s place to compose his first album. There he meets So, a mysterious investigator working on behalf of the startup Digital Cool. She will persuade Jerem to try out Yves, a new kind of smart refrigerator gifted with an IA.


FEATURE FILMS 

Alice and the Mayor (Nicolas Pariser): Paul Théraneau, the mayor of Lyon, is in existential crisis. After 30 years in politics, he feels totally empty and devoid of ideas. As a fix for this problem, his aides bring a brilliant young philosopher, Alice Heimann, into his inner circle. A dialogue develops between Alice and the mayor and the two become closer, which calls into question everything they were most sure of. Gradually, the inevitable question arises: are philosophy and political necessity compatible?

And Then We Danced (Levan Akin):  Merab has been training since a young age at the National Georgian Ensemble with his dance partner Mary. His world is suddenly turned upside down when the charismatic and carefree Irakli arrives and becomes both his strongest rival and desire. In this conservative setting Merab finds himself having to break free and risk it all.

The Halt (Lav Diaz): It is the year 2034 AD and Southeast Asia has been in the dark for the last three years, literally, because the sun hasn’t shone as a result of massive volcanic eruptions at the Celebes Sea in 2031. Madmen control countries, communities, enclaves and bubble cities. Cataclysmic epidemics razed over the continent. Millions have died and millions have left.

Dogs Don't Wear Pants (Jukka-Pekka Valkeapää): Juha has lost his wife in a drowning accident. Years after he still feels numb and unable to connect with people. Meeting Mona, a dominatrix, changes everything. Dogs Don’t Wear Pants is a darkly humorous story of loss, love and the sweet pain of being.

Song Without a Name (Melina León): Peru, at the height of the political crisis of the 1980’s. Georgina is a young woman from the Andes whose newborn daughter is stolen at a fake health clinic. Her desperate search for the child leads her to the headquarters of a major newspaper, where she meets Pedro Campos, a lonely journalist who takes on the investigation. Based on a true story.

Ghost Tropic (Bas Devos): After a long day at work, fiftyeight-year-old Khadija falls asleep on the last subway train. When she wakes up at the end of the line, she has no choice but to make her way home on foot. On her nocturnal journey she finds herself compelled to ask for and give help to the other inhabitants of the night.

Give Me Liberty (Kirill Mikhanovsky): Vic, a hapless young Russian American, drives a medical van for people with disabilities in Milwaukee. Already running late on a day when street protests have broken out, Vic is on the verge of being fired. When he reluctantly agrees to ferry his grandfather and a dozen elderly Russians to a funeral, his day goes from bad to worse. But when, on the way to the funeral, Vic stops in an African American neighborhood to pick up Tracy, a woman with ALS, Vic’s day spins completely out of control… Inspired by experiences from his own youth, acclaimed director Kirill Mikhanovsky delivers a hilarious, touching and life-affirming comedy.

First Love (Takashi Miike): Set over one night in Tokyo, we follow Leo, a young boxer down on his luck as he meets his ‘first love’ Monica, a call girl and an addict but still an innocent. Little does Leo know, Monica is unwittingly caught up in a drug-smuggling scheme, and the two are pursued through the night by a corrupt cop, a yakuza, his nemesis, and a female assassin sent by the Chinese Triads. All their fates intertwine in spectacular Miike style, at his most and fun and anarchic.

The Lighthouse (Robert Eggers): From Robert Eggers, the visionary filmmaker behind the modern horror masterpiece The Witch, comes this hypnotic and hallucinatory tale of two lighthouse keepers on a remote and mysterious New England island in the 1890s.

Lillian (Andreas Horwath): Lillian, an emigrant stranded in New York City, decides to walk back to her native Russia. She resolutely starts out on the long journey. A road movie straight across the USA into the freezing temperatures of Alaska. The chronicle of a slow disappearance.

Oleg (Juris Kursietis): Latvian Oleg tries to make a living and finds a job in his profession, in a meat factory in Brussels. Betrayed by a colleague, this job doesn’t last. Oleg is then sheltered by the Polish migrant-worker mafia.

Blow It to Bits (Lech Kowalski): A mix of Rock and Roll and Blues are the secret for successful rebellion. When I took my camera to the middle of France where the GM&S factory was threatened by a permanent shut down, I felt like something extraordinary was about to take place. And it did. The lyrics were written by workers who have had enough! The tune was composed by people not afraid to go against even the rules of revolt! The volume was loud enough to attract the media. Their working-class concert spread across France like wild fire. I sat out of sight, camera in hand, filming like catching fish in a barrel.

The Orphanage (Shahrbanoo Sadat): In the late 1980s, 15-year-old Qodrat lives in the streets of Kabul and sells cinema tickets on the black market. He is a big Bollywood fan and he daydreams himself into some of his favorite movie scenes. One day the police brings him to the Soviet orphanage. But in Kabul the political situation is changing. Qodrat and all the children want to defend their home.

Les Particules (Blaise Harrison): Pays de Gex, on the French-Swiss border. P.A. and his group of friends are in their last year of high school. One hundred meters beneath their feet, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the most powerful particle accelerator in the world, is crashing protons into each other to recreate the energy conditions of the big bang and detect previously unknown particles. As winter sets in and P.A. sees the world shifting around him, he starts to observe strange phenomena in the environment. The changes are imperceptible at first, but gradually his whole world seems to be on the brink.

Perdrix (Erwan Le Duc): Pierre Perdrix has been enjoying an enchanted though restless existence since the enigmatic Juliette Webb burst into his life. A stranger who landed in his family’s unique world like a meteorite, and who by her presence alone will force this tight-knit microcosm to redefine their boundaries and finally begin to fully live their lives. 

For the Money (Alejo Moguillansky): “We were workers of luxury. And nobody was rich enough to pay us. We had to be at the same time the actor and the documentarist. We had to be at the same time the painter and their muse. The poet and the landscape. The rifle and its prey. The rider and the horse. Don Quixote and Cervantes at the same time.” A miserable Argentine troupe of actors, dancers, musicians, film-makers and a girl embark on a theatre tour to some country, probably in Latin America. If ever love and money were irreconcilable, Por el dinero is the story of that tragedy.

Sick Sick Sick (Alice Furtado): Silvia is an introspective young girl who is not interested in the daily routine between family and school. Everything abruptly changes when Artur arrives unexpectedly in her class, after being banned from several other schools. Silvia is amazed by the vitality of the boy, who actually suffers from a serious illness – hemophilia. The two immerse themselves in an intense and brief coexistence, interrupted by an accident in which Artur’s bleeds to death. Silvia gets sick and sees her life turn into a strange nightmare. The mourning gradually becomes an obsession, and obsession becomes a goal – Silvia will do anything to bring him back to life.

Tlamess (Ala Eddine Slim): S is a young soldier in the southern desert of Tunisia. When S learns about his mother’s death, he obtains a week’s leave and goes back home. He will never return to the camp. In his popular neighborhood starts a man hunt after which S eventually escapes through the mountain. Few years later, F, a young woman married to a rich business man who has just settled in a luxurious villa, learns of her pregnancy. One morning, she goes out alone for a walk in the forest. She will never come back.

To Live to Sing (Johnny Ma): Zhao Li manages a Sichuan Opera troupe that lives and performs together in a rundown theatre in the outskirts of Chengdu. When she receives an order of demolition, she hides the news, fearing that this could spell their end. Secretly, she wouldn’t mind stopping since their life has become harder over the years. But what else can she do? She also worries that her niece Dan Dan, their star, will leave them for a better future in the city. To keep her troupe “family” together, Zhao Li begins a search for a new theatre for them to both sing and live in. As she struggles with bureaucracy, the characters from the opera world that she uses to escape her troubles begin to seep into her real life…

An Easy Girl (Rebecca Zlotowski): Naima is 16 and lives in Cannes. She has given herself the summer to choose what she wants to do with her life. Then her cousin Sofia, with her alluring lifestyle, arrives to spend the holidays with her. Together, they will share an unforgettable summer.

Wounds (Babak Anvari): Will is a bartender in New Orleans. He has a great job, great friends, and a girlfriend, Carrie, who loves him. He skates across life’s surface, ignoring complications and concentrating on enjoying the moment. One night at the bar, a violent brawl breaks out, which injures one of his regular customers and causes some college kids to leave behind a cell phone in their haste. Will begins receiving disturbing texts and calls from the stranger’s phone. While Will hopes to not get involved, Carrie gets lost down a rabbit hole investigating this strange malevolence. They’ve discovered something unspeakable, and it’s crawling slowly into the light.

Zombi Child (Bertrand Bonello): Haiti, 1962: A man is brought back from the dead only to be sent to the living hell of the sugarcane fields. In Paris, 55 years later, at the prestigious Légion d’honneur boarding school, a Haitian girl confesses an old family secret to a group of new friends - never imagining that this strange tale will convince a heartbroken classmate to do the unthinkable.


SPECIAL SCREENINGS

Red 11 (Roberto Rodriguez): Based on Robert Rodriguez’s experiences in a Medical Research Facility to finance his first feature El mariachi, but with a sci-fi and horror twist. Red 11 is set in the dark, twisted world of the Legal Drug Research business. College kids turn Lab Rats to make quick money, and our hero, Rob (who is assigned the color and number Red 11) is here to buy his way out of a huge debt to the tune of $7,000. But things get surreal when he’s not sure if the hospital is really trying to kill him, or if it’s side effects from the experimental drugs.

The Staggering Girl (Luca Guadagnino): The cinematographic language and the language of Couture simultaneously follow an intimate story line, made of symbols, gestures and images. Moving between Rome and New York, the movie narrates the strength of a blood relationship between two women who have come to a day of reckoning with themselves, through a diachronic and introspective overview.


SHORT AND MEDIUM LENGTH

Two Sisters Who Are Not Sisters (Beatrice Gibson): Two sisters (who are not sister’s), two pregnancies, a two-seater car, a beauty queen, a poodle and the election of a second fascist – this time in Brazil. An abstract crime thriller without a crime, Two sisters… unfolds like a dream. Based on an original screenplay by Gertrude Stein.

The Marvelous Misadventures of the Stone Lady (Gabriel Abrantes): Tired of being a banal architectural ornamental, a sculpture runs from the Louvre to confront real life on the streets of Paris.

Grand Bouquet (Nao Yoshigai): A helpless woman confronts "a black object" with a power greater than hers.The "black object" shoots her questions. The woman has answers to these questions, but can't say them aloud. She feels up against the wall, and begins to throw up beautiful colorful flowers instead of speaking.

Je Te Tiens (Sergio Caballero): It is the road trip of a mother and her daughter through strange worlds. The daughter wants to kill herself and the mother will try to talk her out of it.

Movements (Dahee Jeong): In the space of 10 minutes, the African baobab tree grows 0.008 mm, the fastest dog in the world, the Greyhound, can run 12 km, and the Earth travels 18,000 km around the Sun. "Movements" is a 10-minute film which I drew at a rate of 2 seconds of animation per day. We are all walking, seeing, working, running, and stopping together.

Quello che verrà è solo una promessa (Flatform): In the course of a long, slow take over Funafuti, both drought and floods appear in a constant uninterrupted rhythm. The state of flux between both type of events is reflected in the places and actions of the inhabitants making the island’s extremes seem familiar: the air is riven with waiting and suspension. The island of Funafuti, in the archipelago of Tuvalu, for some years now has become the stage for a unique phenomenon. Due to the unnatural warming of the sea, saltwater seeps into the subsoil bubbling up through the porous terrain provoking floods which put the future of life on this island at risk.

Olla (Ariane Labed): Olla responded to an advertisement on an eastern women dating site. She moves in with Pierre, who lives with his old mother. But nothing happens as planned.

Piece of Meat (Jerrold Chong & Huang Junxiang): Enslaved in a surreal world of living objects, a lamb cutlet does whatever it takes to make ends meet.

Ghost Pleasure (Morgan Simon): Jeanne, a single mother bringing up her nine-year-old daughter Mylène, daydreams about their next trip to the sea.

Stay Awake, Be Ready (An Pham Thien): On a street corner a mysterious conversation among three young men at a street stalls. Meanwhile a traffic accident on a motorbike. The night brings together a sketch, a multicolor frame of reality​.

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