Cannes Directors’ Fortnight: ‘A Chiara,’ ‘Magnetic Beats’ Win Big

John Hopewell Chief International CorrespondentParis-based sales agency Luxbox has added sales to the U.K., Australia and Brazil to previous deals with the U.S. and France on Directors’ Fortnight title “Clara Sola,” making good on its upbeat critical reception at the Cannes Festival this month.London-based Peccadillo Pictures has acquired U.K.

Christopher Vourlias Three volunteer workers set out from Bucharest in a convoy destined for the mountainous hinterlands of Romania, where they plan to distribute aid supplies to remote villages. But when their SUV breaks down after they decide to help a lonely old man on a desolate mountain road, their notions of empathy and charity get put to the test.

EXCLUSIVE: Oscilloscope Laboratories has picked up North American rights to Alessio Rigo de Righi and Matteo Zoppis’s first fiction feature film The Tale Of King Crab.

Matt Donnelly Senior Film WriterContinuing its victory lap around the 2021 Cannes Film Festival, indie studio NEON has acquired the North American distribution rights to “A Chiara.”The Jonas Carpignano film won the top prize in the Cannes Directors’ Fortnight section. It is a companion film to his 2017 “A Ciambra,” for which he took the same award that year.

Director Vincent Maël Cardona uses western Europe in the early-1980s as the canvas upon which he paints his layered and achingly genuine portrait of young love, familial bondage, artistic aspiration, and universal chaos. Unburdened by a firm connection to any one genre or narrative archetype, “Magnetic Beats” tells a simple story with a full arsenal of source music, thoughtful set design, and crisp acting at all levels to pull off this love letter to a particular moment in time.

It’s a good thing you can’t catch a virus from an image because if you could, just a few frames of Kirill Serebrennikov‘s fabulously yeasty, bilious, dank Competition title, “Petrov’s Flu” would bring all of Cannes‘ anti-Covid measures to naught.

Tatiana Huezo’s eye for lyrical truth has materialized in documentaries like “Tempestad” or “The Tinniest Place,” works that penetrate some of the most tenebrous corners in recent Latin American history with shimmering compassion. Her stance as an acute observer of the people that survive and persevere through tumultuous sociopolitical and economically disadvantaged contexts produces thought-provoking filmic meditations.

In “A Hero” (“Ghahreman”), Asghar Farhadi blurs the line of innocence and guilt in a fraught drama about the true weight of a good deed. During a two-day reprieve from prison, Rahim Soltani (Amir Jadidi) and his girlfriend Farkhondeh (Sahar Goldust) discover a handbag full of golden coins.

When teenaged environmental activist Greta Thunberg made her now-famous speech at the UN Headquarters in 2019, she was met with equal parts admiration and derision, likely an unfavorable imbalance toward the latter. For every A-list celebrity who reposted a clip on their Instagram story, adorned with enthusiastic heart emojis, surely another handful of Internet trolls lurked in the comments and left discouraging messages.

The rise in popularity of true crime stories has seen the line between genuine investigation and lurid exploitation become increasingly blurred. With every new Netflix docu-series, podcast episode, and beach-read paperback, content creators are having to go further afield to dig up some crime forgotten to history to recast in a light that often appears oriented for entertainment first, with any richer insights an inadvertent byproduct.

It would be disingenuous not to begin this review by mentioning that, yes, Panah Panahi is indeed related to the titan of Iranian cinema, Jafar Panahi.

Leo Barraclough International Features EditorBrussels-based sales agency Best Friend Forever has closed a deal for France with ambitious distributor Wayna Pitch on Anita Rocha da Silveira’s “Medusa,” which plays in Directors’ Fortnight at the Cannes Film Festival.The drama, set in contemporary Brazil, centers on 21-year-old Mariana, who belongs to a world where she must do her utmost to keep up the appearance of a perfect woman.

What do we really know about children? Until the Renaissance, artists were still painting them as freakish shriveled adults. Only in the last century-ish did American society decide they probably should go to school instead of laboring all day in sweatshops.

We can all stop wishing it a long life: the new flesh is thriving, living rent-free in Julia Ducournau‘s fucked-up titanium brain, oozing from every frame of her bizarrely beautiful, emphatically queer sophomore film, and thence seeping in through your orifices, the better to colonize your most lurid, confusing nightmares, as well as that certain class of sex dream that you’d be best off never confessing to having.

“Where are you really from?” It’s an invasive question that’s awfully familiar to people of color, one that intrudes its way into our everyday lives. Though it can have innocent intentions, it’s often hostile and only works to invalidate our livelihood.

“Magnetic Beats,” the directorial debut from Vincent Maël Cardona, is one of the most exciting new features at this year’s Directors’ Fortnight at Cannes. And in the wake of the recent world premiere of the feature, we’re happy to offer our readers an exclusive clip from the new drama.

A Croatian teen comes of age in Antoneta Alamat Kusijanovic’s Murina, showing in Directors’ Fortnight at the Cannes Film Festival. Executive Produced by Martin Scorsese, it stars Gracija Filipovic as Julija, who lives on a remote island with her mother Nela (Danica Curcic) and father Ante (Leon Lucev).

Premiering in competition at this year’s Festival de Cannes, Nanni Moretti’s wild melodrama “Three Floors” is based on a 2017 Israeli novel called “Shalosh Qomot” from writer Eshkol Nevo and begins with an undeniably tragic event. One dark night on a quiet street of Rome, a drunk driver runs over a lady crossing the road, narrowly avoids hitting a pregnant woman, then finally crashes into a building, landing straight into a family’s living room.

What do fans of Sylvan Esso dance house remixes and Bob Dylan have in common? Almost nothing, you’d imagine, and you’d probably be right. But in Clio Barnard’s sweet, unlikely romance “Ali & Ava,” which premiered as part of Cannes’ Directors’ Fortnight program, the two titular characters—both from opposite musical camps—learn to find common ground in each other’s preferences and more, to share in each other’s lives.

EXCLUSIVE: Oscilloscope Laboratories has swooped on North American rights to Costa Rican-Swedish filmmaker Nathalie Álvarez Mesén’s debut feature Clara Sola here in Cannes.