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NEWS
- Designed by Hartland Villa, the official poster for the 75th edition of the Cannes Film Festival features a still from Peter Weir and Andrew Niccol’s The Truman Show. The festival has also unveiled the lineup for its official selection, which features a hefty list of competitors for the Palme d'Or (including David Cronenberg's Crimes of the Future, Claire Denis' Stars at Noon, Hirokazu Kore-eda's Broker, and Kelly Reichardt's Showing Up). Check out the full lineup here.
- Accompanying the official selection are the Directors' Fortnight and Critics' Week lineups, which are not to be overlooked. Pietro Marcello's French-language debut Scarlet will be opening the Directors' Fortnight, while Yann Gonzalez and July Jung will be premiering new films at Critics' Week.
- Kelly Reichardt will be receiving an honorary Golden Leopard from this year's Locarno International Film Festival in celebration of her distinguished career, throughout which she's "[redesigned] the profile of genres, from western to thriller, bringing to the public, on the screen, the issues of the present with which one can engage."
- Ahead of his English-language feature debut A Manual for Cleaning Women, Pedro Almodóvar will be directing a Western short film entitled Extraña forma de vida. The film is set to be shot in the Spanish city of Almería, famed for its appearance in films by Sergio Leone, Joseph L. Mankiewicz's Cleopatra, and even Orson Welles' F for Fake.
RECOMMENDED VIEWING
- The official teaser for David Cronenberg's Crimes of the Future is finally here, ahead of the film's world premiere at the Cannes Film Festival. The film stars Viggo Mortensen as a performance artist in a distant future where the human body now "undergoes new transformations and mutations." As many have pointed out, the international trailer shows more skin-crawling (and skin-tearing) footage from the film.
- Altered Innocence presents the official trailer for Bertrand Mandico's queer sci-fi fantasy After Blue (Dirty Paradise), which premiered at Locarno last year and went on to play at TIFF and Fantastic Fest. The film is set on a planet inhabited by woman, where a murderer named Kate Bush is on the loose.
RECOMMENDED READING
Above: Dziga Vertov's Man With a Movie Camera (1929)
- Sight and Sound has published a profile of local archivists in Ukraine and their ongoing efforts to preserve Ukraine's cultural identity through cinema with local and global screenings, including in Kyiv subway stations.
- For the Guardian, Caitlin Quinlan provides an essential overview on a new wave of Mexican female filmmakers (like Prayers for the Stolen director Tatiana Huezo and Robe of Gems director Natalia López Gallardo) whose "urgent, disquieting cinema" addresses the horrific threat of violence against women.
- e-flux has published a six-part conversation between artist Iman Issa and experimental filmmaker Amit Dutta (the subject of our 2020 retrospective, The Inimitable Image: An Amit Dutta Retrospective), in which Dutta discusses his poetic approach to filmmaking and what it means to be an artist from a colonized country.
- In a new interview with Filmmaker Magazine, Jane Schoenbrun shares stories from their suburban childhood and early days on the internet, and how these experiences informed We're All Going to the World's Fair.
- Tom Ellen of ES Magazine sits with Charlotte Rampling to discuss the darker side that draws her to provocative roles (including her recent role in Paul Verhoeven's Benedetta) and the "hard-headed individualism" that has lasted throughout her illustrious career.
RECOMMENDED EVENTS
- At UCLA on April 22, author and critic Genevieve Yue will be presenting a series of experimental films that consider the subject of the “China Girl," a type of reference image used in commercial film laboratories throughout history. Each film exemplifies the subject of Yue's book Girl Head: Feminism and Film Materiality, which she will be discussing before the screening.
- MoMA's screening series, Forgotten Filmmakers of the French New Wave, will take place May 4-June 2. Showcasing more than 40 features and shorts, the series is dedicated to oft-overlooked filmmakers like Alain Cavalier and James Blue.
RECOMMENDED LISTENING
- For NTS, director Ed Lachman has curated a mix of songs that pay homage to Andy Warhol. Lachman's concert film Songs For Drella (which is currently streaming on MUBI in many countries) captures a performance of the titular album by Lou Reed and John Cale, which was dedicated to Warhol.
- In its fourth episode of the second season, MUBI Podcast: Encuentros features a conversation between Colombian producer and director Cristina Gallego and Guatemalan director Jayro Bustamente.
RECENTLY ON THE NOTEBOOK
- "Our attempt through this film is to demonstrate how a tale that is passed on orally changes depending on who is telling it." Alessio Rigo de Righi and Matteo Zoppis introduce their film The Tale of King Crab, which is exclusively showing on MUBI in the series Undiscovered.
- Jane Schoenbrun's We're All Going to the World's Fair is MUBI GO's Film of the Week in the US for April 15. To mark the occasion, Schoenbrun shares their Moviegoing Memories and describes We're All Going to the World's Fair as “Le Fantasia Dysphoria.”
- Ruairi McCann writes on RRR, S.S. Rajamouli's epic follow-up to Baahubali and a virtuosic period epic of Indian myth, history, and nationalism.
- Megan Feeney's Notebook Primer is on the career of Charlie Chaplin, from his films to the controversies that flagged him.
- Adrian Curry of Movie Poster of the Week presents several rare Japanese chirashis and a program booklet for Fritz Lang's 1927 film Metropolis, which have recently come up for auction.
- Lawrence Garcia's essay on Jane Schoenbrun's We're All Going to the World's Fair explores the film's perceptual ambiguities and enigmas.
EXTRAS
- The official poster for Park Chan-wook's Decision to Leave. Written by Park and The Handmaiden cowriter Jeong Seo-kyung, the film follows a detective's investigation into a murder, which may be linked to the dead man's mysterious widow.
