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Business News/ Mint-lounge / Features/  Cannes Diary V: A Stellar Second Half
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Cannes Diary V: A Stellar Second Half

The second half of the festival yields some stunning docs and searching features

Jacque Audiard’s Dheepan is a searing and compassionate drama.Premium
Jacque Audiard’s Dheepan is a searing and compassionate drama.

I am enjoying immensely the feast of high quality film on offer at Cannes. It’s also making me realize the importance of the screenplay, the final script and the writing process. From a germ of an idea to the final shooting draft there is a whole process of development, incubation, mentoring and doctoring the script over many months and sometime years before it is green-lighted. I came across many such initiatives in different parts of the world, like L’Atelier and Maison du Scenarist. In India, though, except for the initiative of NFDC’s Film Bazaar and Sundance Scriptwriting Lab, both in Mumbai, not much is done in this area. Back home, very often, as a producer, I receive many submissions which are written over the weekend and land up on my table for consideration.

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Some of the most highly anticipated films in Cannes this year are documentaries. Ice and Sky, the new global warming documentary from Luc Jacquet, who made Oscar-winning March of the Penguins, will close the festival. “For me, there is no border between what is a film and what is a documentary," Jacquet said. “There is the same know-how, the same inspiration. It is quite natural and normal that a documentary can go to Cannes". I was also fortunate to see Hitchcock/Truffaut by Kent Jones, the Director of New York film Festival. The film, which premiered in Cannes yesterday, is inspired by Truffaut’s classic 1966 book Cinema According to Hitchcock, and goes behind the scenes of the epic 27 hours of audio recordings of the two great directors. In this film, film-makers like Wes Anderson, David Fincher and Martin Scorsese talk about how influential the book has been to their lives and careers.

I chanced upon another new feature documentary yesterday at Cannes Classic section, one of the most prominent sections of the festival. This was Ingrid Bergman: In Her Own Words by Stig Bjorkman, about seven-time Academy Award nominee and three-time winner who appeared in films such as Casablanca, Gaslight, Autumn Sonata and many others. Besides these, there is also a documentary about Steve McQueen (Steve McQueen: The Man and Le Mans) and an American Masters documentary called By Sidney Lumet. Other new and significant documentaries are featured in the festival’s Documentary Corner, which gives buyers access to a digital video library of new docs in the marketplace and the opportunity to attend networking and pitching events. To encourage the presence of documentaries at the festical, Cannes, in association with the Association of Auteurs in France, presided over by film-maker Julie Bertuccelli, has organized the first ever prize for Best Documentary, the Golden Eye, with a cash prize of 5,000 Euros!

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In the second half of the Cannes film festival, as usual, the rains arrive for a day and with them bring some of the best cinematic offerings. In my experience, the Cannes scheduling in the second half is always the best.

Son of Saul is one of the best films of the festival and also the most difficult to watch. This film by Hungarian newcomer Laszlo Nemes is perhaps one of the most striking works of art about the holocaust. It is about a member of the Sonderkommandos who may or may not have seen his son in one of the gas chambers. This film is certainly a favourite for the Palme d’Or.

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For me, the best film this year is Youth by Paolo Sorrentino, the award winning film-maker from Italy who won the Grand Prix at Cannes and followed by the Oscar for the Best Foreign film in 2014. Retired music composer Fred (Michael Caine) and film director Mick (Harvey Keitel), two old friends approaching their eighties, are enjoying a vacation in a lovely hotel in the foothills of the Swiss Alps. They discuss old flames, their children and activities of other guests at the hotel. At the end of the standing ovation this film got, I wanted to see this film again. I could see lot of Fellini in the film. Possibly, Michael Caine might get the Best Actor prize.

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Jacque Audiard’s Dheepan is a searing and compassionate drama, and another standout Competition film this year. Jacque Audiard is one of the best known French film-makers currently working, with films as The Beat That My Heart Skipped and A Prophet. The film is set in Sri Lanka during the ethnic war. A militant called Dheepan, an abandoned woman and her child, posing as a fake family, are given passports to leave for France, where they are granted asylum. Dheepan, haunted by the violence of the war and the death of his real wife and a child, is again confronted by the violence of his multicultural neighbourhood full of immigrants. Dheepan and his new family’s longing for home and their hope for a new life drive the film and the journey of the protagonist. Both the leads, Antonythasan Jesuthasan and Kalieaswari Srinivasan, are superb. This is Audiard’s most compassionate and humane story to date. I was, however, disappointed by Hou Hsiao-Hsien’s The Assassin, which was considered to be one of the strongest entries this year.

The Cannes Film Festival will be held from 13-24 May.

Sunil Doshi is a film producer and a regular at Cannes.

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Published: 22 May 2015, 05:05 PM IST
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