Above: The Wild Pear Tree by Nuri Bilge Ceylan (Turkey)
Cannes started a little earlier than usual this year so I’m doing my annual poster round-up of the Competition films a few days after the opening bell. Were I in Cannes myself, the film I’d most be looking forward to would be the new Nuri Bilge Ceylan and the image from the poster for The Wild Pear Tree—of a man sitting on a beach contemplating the water—seems the perfect image to kick off a contemplation of the world’s preeminent seaside film festival. (There are a whole slew of posters for the film on Ceylan’s website, but this one, even though it looks a little like a photo run through a J.M.W. Turner iPhone filter, is my favorite).
Since few of the films in Competition have been around long enough to develop a decent marketing strategy for—a rare exception being the stylish, tricksy poster for David Robert Mitchell’s Under the Silver Lake, which opens in the US next month—most Cannes posters tend to be fairly simple marriages of photo and text. I am always impressed by the few illustrated posters that make it to the Croisette, like those for Alice Rohrwacher’s Happy Lazzaro and Jafar Panahi’s Three Faces, both of which are wonderful. And there are some other very strong images here, like those for Ayka and Burning and Dogman. And as has seemed to be a trend in recent years, there is of course one poster featuring a close-up of Vincent Lindon (I’m not complaining—I love Vincent Lindon).
There are a few films that don’t seem to have key art yet—most notably Spike Lee’s BlackKklansman [update: the poster premiered 5/17]—but I will add them if they turn up during the next nine days. In the meantime, here are all the posters from the Competition in alphabetical order by English-language title.
Above: Asako I & II by Ryusuke Hamaguchi (Japan)
Above: Ash Is Purest White by Jia Zhangke (China)
Above: Ayka by Sergey Dvortsevoy (Russia)
Above: At War by Stephane Brizé (France)
Above: Blackkklansman by Spike Lee (USA)
Above: Burning by Lee-Chang Dong (S. Korea)
Above: Capernaum by Nadine Labaki (Lebanon)
Above: Cold War by Pawel Pawlikowski (Poland)
Above: Dogman by Matteo Garrone (Italy)
Above: Everybody Knows by Asghar Farhadi (France/Spain/Italy)
Above: Happy Lazzaro by Alice Rohrwacher (Italy)
Above: Knife + Heart by Yann Gonzalez (France)
Above: Le livre d’Image by Jean-Luc Godard (Switzerland)
Above: Shoplifters by Kore-Eda Hirokazu (Japan)
Above: Sorry Angel by Christophe Honoré (France)
Above: Three Faces by Jafar Panahi (Iran)
Above: Under The Silver Lake by David Robert Mitchell (USA)
Above: Yomeddine by A.B Shawky (Egypt)
Still to come:
Girls Of The Sun by Eva Husson (France)
Leto by Kirill Serebrennikov (Russia)
See previous Cannes Competition poster round-ups here: 2017 | 2016 | 2015 | 2014 | 2013 | 2012 | 2011. And follow me on Twitter for any updates to this year’s crop.