The lineup for the 2022 Cannes Critics’ Week (La Semaine de la Critique) has been announced. See also the full lineup of the Official Selection and Directors' Fortnight.
Next Sohee
COMPETITION — FEATURES
Aftersun (Charlotte Wells): Sophie reflects on the shared joy and private melancholy of a holiday she took with her father twenty years earlier. Memories real and imagined fill the gaps between miniDV footage as she tries to reconcile the father she knew with the man she didn’t.
Alma Viva (Cristèle Alves Meira): Salomé returns to her family village nestled in the Portuguese mountains. As the vacations begin in a carefree atmosphere, her beloved grandmother suddenly dies. While the adults are tearing each other apart over the funeral, Salomé is haunted by the spirit of the one who was considered a witch.
Dalva (Emmanuelle Nicot): Although Dalva is 12, she dresses, wears make-up and lives like a woman. One evening, she’s suddenly taken away from a father’s house. Dumbfounded and outraged at first, she later meets Jayden, a social worker, and Samia, a teen with a temper. A new life seems to start for Dalva.
La Jauría (Andrés Ramírez Pulido): Eliú is incarcerated in a minors’ center in the heart of Colombian forest, for a crime he committed with his friend El Mono. The teenagers perform manual labor and intense group therapy. One day, El Mono is transferred to the same center.
Summer Scars (Simon Rieth): Brothers Tony and Noé pass the long sweltering summer days playing games of chance and death… until the accident that will change their lives forever. Ten years later, now young adults and back in Royan, their paths cross that of Cassandra, their childhood love.
Imagine (Ali Behrad): Night in Tehran. A daydreaming cab driver falls in love with a woman he can’t have, leaving to a series of encounters, filled with mystery and playful moments.
The Woodcutter Story (Mikko Myllylahti): Pepe is a woodcutter in an idyllic small town in Finland. In the span of a couple of days, a series of tragic events gradually destroys his quiet and happy life – but Pepe seems to be fine with it all. As if he held a secret to existence that is hard to grasp.
COMPETITION — SHORTS
Canker (Lin Tu): As the flashy life of the influencer 33 gets crazier, the canker sore inside her lower lip keeps growing larger…
Las criaturas que se derriten bajo el sol (Diego Cespedes): Nataly, a trans woman is visiting her ex lover Leon with her daughter Secreto. Leon is living in a mysterious community hiding from the sun: these reunions will remind Nataly the memory of a toxic and abusive relationship.
Chords (Estibaliz Urresola Solaguren): Rita belongs to a choir which is in danger of breaking up – they’ve lost the subsidy that allowed them to rent a rehearsal room. The group has to decide whether to accept sponsorship by the company causing pollution in the valley.
Will You Look At Me (Shuli Huang): As a young Chinese filmmaker returns to his hometown in search for himself, a long due conversation with his mother dives the two of them into a quest for acceptance and love.
Ice Merchants (João Gonzalez): Every day, a father and his son jump with a parachute from their vertiginous cold house, attached to a cliff, to go to the village on the ground, far away where they sell the ice they produce daily.
It’s Nice In Here (Robert-Jonathan Koeyers): A fragmented portrait of a moment seen through the subjective memories of a young Black girl, Imani, and a rookie police officer, David, who both have different recollections of the same fateful moment that will alter their lives forever.
I Didn’t Make It To Love Her (Anna Fernandez De Paco): Marko and Maja are moving flats in Sarajevo. Maja’s depression turns Marko’s struggle into poetry, and played on the radio, Marko’s poems become the last bridge of communication between them.
On Xerxes’ Throne (Evi Kalogiropoulou): A ban on physical contact in a dystopian workplace has turned interaction into otherworldly simulations. The suppression of touch transformed the boatyard into charged landscape of alienation and sensuality beyond heteronormative desires.
Manta Ray (Anton Bialas): Three characters in search of poetic and liberating breaches in a gradually authoritarian Paris, on the verge of implosion. Each in their own way, crafts a situation, where, alternately, a sense of lightness can be found, suffocated screams can uprise and reality be distorted into new horizons.
Swan In the Center (Iris Chassaigne): In a deserted shopping center, Swan, a junior consultant, navigates the empty hallways in search of clients and salespeople willing to participate in her survey. As days and encounters go by, desire gets in her way.
SPECIAL SCREENINGS — FEATURES
When You Finish Saving The World (Jesse Eisenberg): Evelyn and her oblivious son Ziggy seek out replacements for each other as Evelyn desperately tries to parent an unassuming teenager at her shelter, while Ziggy fumbles through his pursuit of a brilliant young woman at school.
Sons Of Ramses (Clément Cogitore): In the multicultural Parisian district of La Goutte d’Or, Ramses makes a living as a clairvoyant, scamming his clients into believing he can contact the dead until one fateful night he is forced to confront the ghosts of his own past.
Everybody Loves Jeanne (Céline Devaux): Everybody has always loved Jeanne. These days, she hates herself. Up to her ears in debt, she has to go to Lisbon and sell her mother’s apartment, who passed away one year ago. At the airport, she runs into Jean, a whimsical and somewhat intrusive former high school classmate.
Next Sohee (July Jung)
SPECIAL SCREENINGS — SHORTS
Amo (Emmanuel Gras): In a universe that looks like nothingness, two beings seem to exist only to come into contact.
Hideous (Yann Gonzalez): Popstar Oliver Sim is the main guest of a talk-show that soon slides into a surreal journey of love, shame and blood. A three-part musical short.
Scale (Joseph Pierce): Driving along the motorway, Will loses his sense of scale. As his crippling drug addiction deepens, he struggles to unpick the sequence of events that led to his predicament, before he’s lost forever.