Cannes Report Day 9: ‘A Hero’ Emerges as Palme d’Or Contender, ‘Titane’ Adds to Wild Festival

Christopher Vourlias Philipp Yuryev’s “The Whaler Boy,” which took home the Venice Days award at last year’s Venice Film Festival, won the top prize at the Transilvania Film Festival on Saturday.The jury praised the Russian director’s feature debut, an offbeat story of a teenage whale hunter on the Bering Strait who sets out to meet a webcam model, for being “beautiful and meticulous in its sense of time and place” while also being “really resonant and contemporary at the same time as being

Nick Vivarelli International CorrespondentVenice Film Festival organizers are closely monitoring the possible impact of the spread of the Delta variant, but sounded an upbeat note on Monday with artistic director Alberto Barbera saying he was confident “the situation will be much less complicated than Cannes.”Venice is organizing free COVID tests on site in a number of different locations, but daily testing will likely not be mandatory.

Cannes Film Fesitval’s jury president Spike Lee appeared to inadvertently lift the lid on this year’s Palme d’Or winner – naming Julia Ducournau’s Titane – after a mix-up early in tonight’s closing awards ceremony. Watch the moment further down this page.

The prize paradeAccording to the awards that have been handed out in Cannes, the festival’s top films this year have been “A Chiara,” “Magnetic Beats,” “Feathers,” “Unclenching the Fists” and the short films “The Salamander Child” and “Cicada.”That, at least, is according to the honors that have been announced in the last few days in the Un Certain Regard, Directors Fortnight, Critics Week and Cinefondation sections.

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.

Check out TheWrap’s digital Cannes magazine issue here. You can find all of TheWrap’s Cannes coverage here.How busy has Tilda Swinton been this Cannes? She’s got five movies in the festival, she became an Internet meme along with her “French Dispatch” co-stars, and on Friday she picked up the coveted Palm Dog Award. The prize is a makeshift award created by journalists in 2001 to celebrate the best canine performers in the festival.

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.

Check out TheWrap’s digital Cannes magazine issue here. You can find all of TheWrap’s Cannes coverage here.Sean Baker’s “Red Rocket” proved to be another highlight in this year’s Cannes Film Festival, but the person earning real raves is the film’s star, Simon Rex.

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.

Elsa Keslassy International CorrespondentLea Seydoux, one of France’s biggest stars who was expected to be the toast of Cannes with four films in competition, issued a statement on July 14 saying that she won’t be able to attend the festival as she is currently self-isolating after testing positive to Covid. “Sadly, I have to self-quarantine in Paris and won’t be able to attend the Cannes Film Festival this year.

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.

Check out TheWrap’s digital Cannes magazine issue here. You can find all of TheWrap’s Cannes coverage here.Oliver Stone headed to the Cannes Film Festival this week 30 years after the release of his dramatic saga “JFK,” this time with a documentary about the John F. Kennedy assassination murder that aims to get more answers about the 1963 event.

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.

Check out TheWrap’s digital Cannes magazine issue here. You can find all of TheWrap’s Cannes coverage here.We’re entering Week 2 of Cannes, and as people eagerly await Wes Anderson’s “The French Dispatch,” strong reviews continue to roll out of the festival, including for recent premieres “Bergman Island” and “Drive My Car.” “Bergman Island” from director Mia Hansen-Løve turns out to be very Swedish, drawing much of its energy not just from legend Ingmar Bergman, but also a dance sequence set to

The Lakefront Music Festival had to continue on without Lady A.

Jodie Turner-Smith is seeking help for an alleged theft.

Just a few days on the heels of “Stillwater,” another American entry in the Cannes Film Festival main competition section explores the complicated relationship between a father and daughter rooted in down-home Americana and close brushes with the law. “Flag Day” marks Sean Penn’s latest directorial return to Cannes since the critically-lambasted “The Last Face” from 2016.

Sean Penn’s “Flag Day” PremieresSean Penn’s “Flag Day” premiered at the festival on Saturday, marking the third time he’s been in Main Competition section as a director — the other times for “The Pledge” in 2001 and “The Last Face” in 2016.TheWrap’s Steve Pond wrote, “While the film sometimes struggles with disparate tones, it’s a solid, subtle drama that opts in most cases for restraint over excess.

Cinema’s love affair with trains goes back, of course, to the very origins of the art form, and more than a century later, the flame shows no sign of dimming. To recent examples such as “Snowpiercer” (2013), “Train to Busan” (2016), and the latest of many adaptations of “Murder on the Orient Express” (2017) can now be added “Compartment no.6” (“Hytti Nro 6”) from Finnish director Juho Kuosmanen, premiering in Competition at this year’s Festival de Cannes.

Lea Seydoux’s Trip to Cannes in Flux As Actress Tests COVID PositiveAccording to multiple media reports, the French actress tested positive for COVID and may have to cancel her trip to Cannes despite having four films, three of which are in competition, at the festival. While a spokesperson for Seydoux has not yet responded to TheWrap’s request for comment, Variety reported that she is asymptomatic and has been self-isolating for over a week at her Paris home.