Spanish cinema will make history at the next edition of the Cannes Film Festival, where it will have three films in the official competition: Amarga Navidad, by Pedro Almodóvar, La bola negra, by Javier Ambrossi and Javier Calvo, known as Los Javis, and El ser querido, by Rodrigo Sorogoyen. After last year's double win with films by Carla Simón and Oliver Laxe in competition, this historic trio confirms an unprecedented trend at a festival traditionally wary of Spanish cinema. Their rivals for the Palme d'Or will include, among others, new films by such established directors as Ryusuke Hamaguchi, László Nemes, Asghar Farhadi, Pawel Pawlikowski, and two directors who have already triumphed at Cannes: Hirokazu Kore-eda and Cristian Mungiu.

Spanish cinema will make history at the next edition of the Cannes Film Festival, where it will have three films in the official competition: Amarga Navidad, by Pedro Almodóvar; La bola negra, by Javier Ambrossi and Javier Calvo, known as Los Javis, and El ser querido, by Rodrigo Sorogoyen. After last year's double feature with films by Carla Simón and Oliver Laxe in competition, this historic trio confirms an unprecedented trend at a festival traditionally wary of Spanish cinema. Their rivals for the Palme d'Or will include, among others, new films by such established auteurs as Ryusuke Hamaguchi, László Nemes, Asghar Farhadi, Paweł Pawlikowski, and two directors who have already triumphed at Cannes: Hirokazu Kore-eda and Cristian Mungiu.

Jafar Panahi (Miyaneh, 1960), the greatest Iranian director of his generation and heir to his mentor Abbas Kiarostami, has also become a symbol of resistance against the Islamic regime of Iran, which long ago banned him from making any films. Indomitable, he continued to practice his craft thanks to the loopholes he found. After his latest imprisonment – seven months for criticizing the arrests of filmmakers Mohamed Rasoulof and Mustafa al-Ahmad – which He was released the day after he went on a hunger strike., Panahi has directed (from hiding) his most accessible and direct film: A simple accident, which opens in theaters this Friday. The film won the Palme d'Or at the last Cannes Film Festival. It's a thriller moral about the revenge of former prisoners of the regime against their torturer. He spoke with ARA a few weeks ago at the San Sebastián Film Festival.

The day after winning the Jury Prize at the Cannes Film Festival, Oliver Laxe (Paris, 1982) returned to his chosen land, the Ancares mountain range, to project Sirado in Navia de Suarna, a small town in Lugo with fewer than 1,000 inhabitants. A gesture that explains much about this Galician filmmaker, forged between Galicia, Barcelona, and Morocco, who speaks throughout the interview in the Catalan he learned while studying at Pompeu Fabra University. Sirado, which opens this Friday, is one of the cinematic sensations of the season.

Ethan Edwards (John Wayne), the protagonist of Desert Centaurs, forged the mold for an entire archetype of anti-hero: that of the man who enters Comanche territory to save an innocent woman and ends up confronting the darkest part of his masculinity. John Ford's character resonates with Luis, the protagonist of Sirado, a father willing to go deep into the Moroccan desert to find his daughter, lost somewhere radishThe character played by Sergi López displays the same obsessive nature but with a more open mentality than Wayne, and it doesn't take long for him to follow a troupe who works as radish in radish. But the fourth feature film by the Galician Oliver Laxe It does connect with Ford's film when it comes to turning around the link of conquest between man and foreign territory. western classic.

To assess the importance of the Cannes Film Festival Jury Prize won by Oliver Laxe's film Sirado (ex aequo with the German Sound of falling) you can go to the archives: no production with a Catalan majority—and this one is 60% of the time—has managed to win an award in the official competition at Cannes in 78 editions of the festival. It's a historic milestone. But you can also look at another fact: shortly after the announcement of the award for Sirado, the magazine Screen announced that Laxe's film had been sold to more than twenty countries, including all of Latin America, the United Kingdom, Germany, Japan, South Korea, Italy, Türkiye, and the United States.

Catalan production Sirado, directed by Galician Oliver Laxe, has made history at the Cannes Film Festival, where it won one of the most important awards in the list, the Jury Prize, ex aequo with Sound of falling, by German director Mascha Schilinski. Cannes is a talisman for Laxe, who has presented all four of his films at the festival, always in different sections and always winning awards. Laxe's film, a road movie across the Sahara in which Sergi López is a father who searches for radish in radish His missing daughter, is a work that combines the ability of cinema to surprise and shock the viewer and a deeper and more reflective spiritual dimension.

Margaret Qualley's second consecutive visit to the Cannes Film Festival, a year after leaving everyone clear-headed with The substance returns to the competition with the detective comedy and proudly queer Honey don't, the second installment of the trilogy of "lesbian B-movies" directed by one of the Coen brothers, Ethan (solo without his brother Joel), and written by his wife, Tricia Cooke, with whom, by the way, he forms an unconventional marriage: he is heterosexual, she herself marries men in sex houses and the two live together as a couple.

Shortly after 10:00 a.m., a total blackout occurred at the Cannes Film Festival, the most important European film event, which hundreds of international journalists were covering. Mobile phone signals immediately went down as well. To everyone's astonishment, the blackout revealed itself to be a massive power outage across the western region of the Alpes-Maritimes, in southeastern France. It left 160,000 homes in the dark in the area bordering Italy and also affected rail transport. Firefighters also had to carry out hundreds of interventions, primarily to rescue people trapped in elevators. The outage lasted about five hours and authorities consider it sabotage. The French Prosecutor's Office has opened an investigation.

Two years afterlooting Etruscan tombs inThe ChimeraJosh O'Connor returns to the Cannes Film Festival as an art thief, but this time it's not ancient relics he steals, but abstract paintings.The mastermindIn Kelly Reichardt's The Dark Knight, the British actor is an unemployed carpenter, married with two children and a conventional life in the Massachusetts suburbs that clearly falls short of what is expected of the son of a judge. The occasional petty theft from the local museum has no consequences, but the theft of four works by abstract painter Arthur Dove, which he steals from a museum with the help of two henchmen, second-rate criminals, does.

This year's Cannes Film Festival will be remembered, at least in terms of fashion, for the organizers' explicit ban on stars showing more than necessary on the red carpet. In practice, the new rules meant that "for reasons of decency," attendees could not appear in outfits that revealed body parts like nipples, or in designs that were too voluminous, or with long trains that impeded proper circulation on the red carpet. The rules had their impact, and this year's Cannes red carpet was more modest and discreet than ever, with a few notable and striking exceptions.

After the premiere last Tuesday of a film by a director banned and persecuted in his country, the Iranian Jafar Panahi, the Cannes Film Festival competition screened another Iranian film this Thursday, but with the official seal of state approval, that is, the approval of the censorship. Independent Iranian filmmakers called the Iranian film "propaganda." Woman and child, by Saeed Roustaee. For the complainants, who have not seen the film, making a movie that passes the censorship of an authoritarian regime implies a degree of complicity with the repressive government.

In 2016, a year before directing Summer 1993, Carla Simón made a short film, Lagoons, based on texts from the letters she kept from her mother, Neus Pipó, who died of AIDS in 1993, and a fragment of a home movie in which a young and carefree Pipó appeared wiping the sleep from her ears. A decade later, having become the Catalan filmmaker of reference for a new generation of directors, Simón returns to her mother's letters, now transformed into phrases from her mother's diary that a teenager reads during a trip to Galicia to meet her father's family, who died when she was young, just like her mother. The desire to put images into the parents' love story and, above all, to know who those people were that she doesn't remember runs through Pilgrimage, Simón's third feature film, the latest installment in the extraordinary universe the director has built from her intimate family materials.

It is still beautiful that Carla Simón (Barcelona, ​​​​1986) present Pilgrimage At the Cannes Film Festival, she was more than eight months pregnant, or as she herself says, "very pregnant and ready for whatever may happen," because the film is a daughter's love letter to parents she lost too early and of whom she barely has any memories. The third film by the director ofSummer 1993 and Alcarràs accompanies a Catalan teenager with the desire to study film on her trip to Galicia to meet her paternal family and the places where her parents' love story took place. Pilgrimage, who speaks Catalan, Spanish and Galician, once again demonstrates Simón's extraordinary talent for capturing the rhythms of life and the secret language of families, but in the second half of the film he also opens a new door in his cinema, a freer and more fantastic one that abandons the strict realism of his previous films.

One of the curiosities of this edition of the Cannes Film Festival is the coincidence in the parallel section Un Certain Regard of the directorial debuts of two popular actresses, established stars of American cinema: Kristen Stewart, who dazzled a few days ago with the poetic and tormented biography of Lidia Yuknavitch The chronology of water; and Scarlett Johansson, who presented this Tuesday Eleanor the Great, a dramatic comedy about a widow with a lot of drive and character who, after the death of her best friend, with whom she shared an apartment in Florida, returns to her native New York at over 90 years old to live with a recently divorced daughter and a grandson glued to his mobile phone screen.

Some films leave a sequence, a dialogue, or an image etched in your memory forever; perhaps just a gesture. But the film that Julia Ducournau presented in Cannes this Monday, it will be difficult to forget the symptoms of the fictional virus that gradually turns the bodies of the sick into stone, marble advancing through the skin and dust in the breath. In the director of Raw (2016) and Titane (2021) it is still interesting to explore the body horror and mutations, but in Alpha does so in the context of a story of internal transformations starring a thirteen-year-old girl who lives alone with her mother and who sets off alarm bells when one day she shows up with a tattoo she got at a party and knows which needles to use. "Could it be infected?" her mother, her classmates, and she herself ask themselves, victims of the state of paranoia and mistrust that has taken hold of society.

It's hard to know how Wes Anderson manages to continue to function as a happy anomaly in today's Hollywood. His films remain, film after film, tremendously true to themselves and oblivious to fads and trends, building a filmography of exceptional coherence in American cinema of recent decades. An independent republic within Hollywood that is only possible thanks to Anderson's supernatural ability to summon in each film a good handful of international stars who lower their cachet to become part of the director's very personal universe. It happens again in the film that premiered this Sunday at the Cannes Film Festival,The Phoenician Plot, which stars Benicio del Toro, Tom Hanks, Bryan Cranston, Scarlett Johansson, Benedict Cumberbatch, Riz Ahmed, Michael Cera and, of course, Bill Murray, who has already collaborated with the director for eleven years.

One of the major issues facing today's world is how the ideological polarization of politics is increasingly spilling over into everyday life and endangering coexistence, especially in a heavily armed society like the United States. Ari Aster points in this direction in Eddington, the debut in the official competition at the Cannes Film Festival of the director of Hereditary (2018) and Midsommar (2019), who after being acclaimed as a master of modern horror in his first films seems determined to expand his scope. He already did so in the dislocated existential comedy Beau is scared (2023) and repeats the play in Eddington imprinting an overtly satirical and misanthropic tone on the story, which follows a rather bungling sheriff (Joaquin Phoenix) with a dysfunctional marriage as he clashes with his town's mayor during the early days of the coronavirus pandemic.

When the Cannes Film Festival is over and the accredited journalists make a mental list of the scenes we saw, the ones we won't be able to get out of our heads, surely the one that breaks in half won't be missing from any list. Sirât, the film by the Galician filmmaker Oliver Laxe –produced by a large part of the Catalan team and produced by Pedro Almodóvar's production company, El Deseo– was presented this Thursday in the official competition and will therefore compete for the Palme d'Or. Sirât It is the story of a father (Sergi López) who, along with his young son, searches for the trail of his eldest daughter, who has been missing for months. The trail they follow leads them to a radish which is held in the Moroccan desert and, with a handful of regular participants of these illegal parties, they embark on a new journey in search of another radish where, perhaps, who knows, they might find the girl. It's the small hope that drives them to cross a desert filled with uncertainty and danger.

In 1996, in the first installment of the saga Mission: ImpossibleEthan Hunt, the character played by Tom Cruise, was just another agent on a mission in Prague that goes awry. Three decades and seven installments later, Tom Cruise is no longer just another star, nor is Ethan Hunt just another secret agent. The actor has become a kind of messiah of entertainment cinema designed to be projected on the big screen and with impressive scenes shot in real locations, and Hunt is now an almost mythological hero with the manifest destiny of making the impossible possible and saving the world from certain destruction. Such a heavy burden to carry that only an actor with Cruise's almost pathological self-esteem and determination could have taken on without the film descending into ridicule.