Eight films from the Americas will screen at the Cannes Film Festival in the Directors Fortnight program, Fortnight creative director Julien Rejl announced on Tuesday.
Directors Fortnight, or Quinzane des Cineastes, is a independent sidebar that presents adventurous works simultaneously with but independently of the main festival.
The 21 feature selections come from 14 different countries and include four films by American directors, including Tyler Taorima’s “Christmas Eve in Miller’s Point,” Carson Lund’s “Eephus,” Ryan J. Sloan’s “Gazer” and India Donaldson’s “Good One.”
The lineup also includes films from Canada, Argentina, Brazil and Chile.
Five of the selections are French, two are Japanese and one, “To a Land Unknown,” is from Palestine.
The Fortnight will also present a special screening of Chantal Akerman’s “Histories D’Amerique: Food, Family and Philosophy.”
Independently of the Fortnight announcement, Cannes also announced this year’s ACID program, which is a selection of three documentaries and six narrative features chosen by a panel of filmmakers.
The full list of ACID selections is below, along with the Fortnight program.
Directors Fortnight was founded in 1969, in the wake of the cancellation of the 1968 festival in solidarity with a French workers strike. Intended to be a non-competitive section that focuses on adventurous work, it now typically showcases the kind of films that might otherwise be in Cannes’ Un Certain Regard section.
Directors Fortnight was the first section in Cannes to present films by Werner Herzog, Martin Scorsese, Spike Lee, Damien Chazelle, Chloe Zhao , Michael Haneke and George Lucas (with “THX 1138” in 1971).
The Fortnight is now on its fifth creative director in the last 15 years in Rejl. In 2022, its board announced that it would “seriously rethink Directors Fortnight, its name, its singularity and its strategic and political role”; the following year, it changed its French name from Quinzaine des Realisateurs to Quinzaine des Cineastes, to focus on more than just directors (realisateurs) in the filmmaking process. In English, though, it is still referred to as Directors Fortnight.
Directors Fortnight lineup:
Feature films:
“Ma Vie Ma Gueule,” Sophie Fillieres (France) – opening film
“A Son Image,” Thierry de Peretti (France)
“Christmas Eve in Miller’s Point,” Tyler Taorima (USA)
“Desert of Namibia,” Yoko Yamanaka (Japan)
“East of Noon,” Hala Elkoussy (Egypt)
“Eat the Night,” Caroline Poggi & Jonathan Vinel (France)
“Eephus,” Carson Lund (USA)
“Gazer,” Ryan J. Sloan (USA)
“Ghost Cat Anzu,” Yoko Kuno & Nobuhiro Yamashita (Japan)
“Good One,” India Donaldson (USA)
“Mongrel,” Chiang Wei Liang & You Qiao Yin (Taiwan)
“Visiting Hours,” Patricia Mazuy (France)
“Savanna and the Mountain,” Paulo Carneiro (Portugal)
“Sister Midnight,” Karan Kandhari (India)
“Something Old, Something New, Something Borrowed,” Hernan Rosselli (Argentina)
“The Falling Sky,” Eryk Rocha & Gabriela Carneiro de Cunha (Brazil)
“The Hyperboreans,” Cristobal Leo & Joaquin Cocina (Chile)
“The Other Way Around,” Jonas Trueba (Spain)
“To a Land Unknown,”Mahdi Fleifel (Palestine)
“Universal Language,” Matthew Rankin (Canada)
“Plastic Guns,” Jean-Christophe Meurisse (France) – closing film
Special screening: “Histories D’Amerique: Food, Family and Philosophy,” Chantal Akerman (Belgium)
Short films:
“After the Sun,” Rayane Mcirdi (France/Algeria)
“Extremely Short,” Totemo Mijaki (Japan)
“Immaculata,” Kim Lea Sakkal (Lebanon)
“Les Meteos D’Antoine,” Jules Follet (France)
“Mulberry Fields,” Mot Lan Dang Do (Vietnam)
“Our Own Shadow, Augustina Sanchez Gavier (Argentina)
“The Moving Garden,” Ines Lima (Portugal)
“Very Gentle Work,” Nate Lavey (USA)
“When the Land Runs Away,” Frederico Lobo (Portugal)
The ACID program is an association of independent filmmakers who have been choosing a small slate of films for the festival since 1992. Justine Triet, who won the Palme d’Or last year for “Anatomy of a Fall,” screened as part of the ACID selection with her first film, “Age of Panic,” in 2013.
ACID program:
“A Fireland,” Mona Convert (documentary, France)
“Ce N’est Qu’un Au Revoir,” Guillaume Brac (documentary, France)
“Château Rouge,” Helene Milano (documentary, France)
“Fotogenico,” Marcia Romano and Benoit Sabatier (fiction, France)
“In Retreat,” Maisam Ali (fiction, India/France)
“It Doesn’t Matter,” Josh Mond (fiction, U.S.A./France)
“Kyuka – Before Summer’s End,” Kostis Charamountanis (fiction, Greece/North Macedonia)
“Mi Bestia,” Camila Beltran (fiction, Colombia/France)
“Most People Die on Sundays,” Iair Said (fiction, Argentina/Italy/Spain)
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