Cannes Review: Ali Abbasi’s ‘Holy Spider’

When his mother spoke, Ernest remembers, everything sounded important. “I cling to her light,” he tells us in voiceover, an adult remembering how that felt. The Ernest he is recalling is just a little boy (Milan Doucansi), snuggled against Rose (Annabelle Lengronne, a wonderfully vivid presence), with his grave and clever older brother Jean (Sidy Fofana) sitting opposite on a train taking them from Cote d’Ivoire to a new French life.

Naman Ramachandran Streamer and distributor MUBI has acquired Ali Abbasi’s Cannes Film Festival competition title “Holy Spider” for the U.K., Ireland, Latin America and Malaysia. The film will be released theatrically followed by an exclusive MUBI streaming release. The film follows family man Saeed as he embarks on his own religious quest — to “cleanse” the holy Iranian city of Mashhad of immoral and corrupt street prostitutes.

MUBI has acquired rights to Cannes hit Holy Spider for the UK, Ireland, LatAm and Malaysia.

CANNES – Lukas Dhont’s second feature, “Close,” starts off where most love stories end, and, in that respect, it begins with almost euphoric joy. Leo (Eden Dambrine) and Remi (Gustav De Waele) are the best of friends.

review of the film for TheWrap, Ben Croll wrote that Abbasi with “Holy Spider” turns the murder thriller “upside down, telling a story where the killer’s identify is never in doubt and his intentions are always crystal clear, and where the greatest source of tension comes from wondering whether anyone in power will lift a finger to stop him.”Abbasi wrote “Holy Spider” with Afshin Kamran Bahrami. Sol Bondy and Jacob Jarek produced the film.

Nick Vivarelli International CorrespondentDanish-Iranian director Ali Abbasi’s boundary-pushing serial killer thriller “Holy Spider has been acquired by U.S. sales and distribution company Utopia for North America.Based on a real Iranian crime case, “Holy Spider” – which made a major splash when it premiered in the Cannes competition on Sunday – is about a family man named Saeed (Mehdi Bajestani) who becomes a serial killer as he embarks on his own religious quest to “cleanse” the holy Iranian city of Mashhad of street prostitutes. Pic chronicles a killing spree in the streets of Mashhad, where 16 prostitutes were found dead from 2000 to 2001.  A local journalist, Rahimi (Zar Amir-Ebrahimi), is trying to crack the case as she grows frustrated by the police’s apathy toward finding the murderer.

EXCLUSIVE: Utopia has finalized its North American deal for Cannes Competition pic Holy Spider, the noir thriller from Danish-Iranian filmmaker Ali Abbasi. We told you the deal was all but there a couple of days ago.

A drastic departure from his prior films “Border” and “Shelley,” Ali Abbasi’s newest film, “Holy Spider,” draws inspiration from the 2000-2001 crimes and subsequent trial of Saeed Hanaei (played here by Mehdi Bajestani), a war veteran-turned-serial killer in the Iranian city of Mashhad who murdered 16 sex workers, claiming that he was cleansing the holy city of sinners and corruption in the name of Islam.

Detective Hae-joon investigating the death of a man who fell from a mountain top. When he meets the deceased man’s wife in Park Chan-wook’s latest film in competition at Cannes, Decision To Leave.  

Forbes). “I know we are human beings and that we are very complicated, and the power of art is that it knows no color. Because human beings, when they sit and watch art they want to feel less alone.

Patrick Frater Asia Bureau ChiefIranian-Danish director Ali Abbasi insists that his Cannes competition film “Holy Spider” is not intended to be a controversial truth telling. Rather, he is telling the truth through a fictional interpretation of real events. The film chronicles a killing spree in the streets of the religious city of Mashhad, where 16 prostitutes were found dead between 2000 and 2001.“I am not a big fan of serial killers or serial killer movies,” Abbasi said May 23 at the Cannes Film Festival.

“We didn’t do the movie to highlight women’s conditions in Iran, we didn’t do the movie to do activist work,” exclaimed Swedish-Iranian filmmaker Ali Abbasi about his latest in competition Cannes Film Festival title, Holy Spider at the pic’s press conference this morning.

Understandably, the terrorist attacks in Paris on the night of November 13, 2015 have been treated with great sensitivity by the French film industry, and the only other film in the Cannes Film Festival’s lineup this year to touch on those events — Alice Winocour’s Paris Revoir — is a lightly fictionalized drama set in the aftermath of the night 130 people were killed, most of them at a rock concert at the city’s Bataclan nightclub. Though many names have been changed, for obvious security reasons, Cedric Jimenez’s Novembre is, by contrast, a heavy-artillery just-the-facts-ma’am police procedural detailing the manhunt that followed in the next five days.

Timing can be cruel. Norwegian director Kristoffer Borgli’s second feature, Sick Of Myself, has the misfortune to arrive in the Cannes Film Festival’s Un Certain Regard section in the slipstream of Ruben Östlund’s divisive but funny competition title Triangle of Sadness; the latter being a broader, sillier but much more brutal dissection of class and culture. Sick Of Myself also has to compete with the unexpected longevity of fellow countryman Joachim Trier’s hit The Worst Person In The World, which last year went from the Cannes competition all the way to the Oscars.

EXCLUSIVE: Holy Spider, the Ali Abbasi-directed Iranian serial killer thriller, is nearing a deal for U.S. rights with Utopia, the U.S. sales and distribution firm owned by Robert Schwartzman and Cole Harper. The provocative Cannes Competition film premiered today on the Croisette to strong applause.

For his directing debut after brother Joel’s first solo outing with The Tragedy of Macbeth, Ethan Coen has chosen a similar saga of ruthless ambition and soul-devouring guilt, telling the rise and fall — and rise again — of Jerry Lee Lewis, from farmer’s son to rock’n’roll idol.

Ramin Setoodeh Executive Editor“Holy Spider,” a gritty drama about a real-life Iranian serial killer, stunned the Cannes Film Festival at its premiere on Sunday afternoon, earning a thunderous seven-minute standing ovation and bringing a jolt of electricity to what’s been a sleepy festival so far.The film, from Iranian-Danish director Ali Abbasi (“Border”), chronicles a killing spree in the streets of the religious city of Mashhad, where 16 prostitutes were found dead from 2000 to 2001.  A local journalist, Rahimi (Zar Amir-Ebrahimi), is trying to crack the case as she grows frustrated by the police’s apathy toward finding the murderer. But in one of many twists in this drama, the identity of the serial killer is revealed early on — he’s a war veteran named Saeed (Mehdi Bajestani), a seemingly normal family man who spends his nights picking up women on his motorcycle and brutally strangling them in his home as a religious cleansing ritual.

stormed the Cannes red carpet donned in body paint to disrupt the “Three Thousand Years of Longing” premiere, a new protest erupted at the start of the red carpet for competition title “Holy Spider,” in which a group of women held smoke bombs and a massive poster — though this time the demonstration appears to have been pre-planned. The group involved in the demonstration is Les Colleuses, a guerilla feminist movement in France.

Matt Donnelly Senior Film WriterA group of women protestors staged a dramatic scene at the Cannes Film Festival on Sunday, releasing plumes of smoke from handheld devices and displaying a long banner for the global press.At the premiere of “Holy Spider,” director Ali Abbasi’s female-centered thriller, roughly 12 women in formalwear gathered on the famed stairs of the festival’s Grand Palais with raised fists — filling the space with thick black smoke and holding a long scroll of women’s names.Security seemed unfazed by the event, allowing the protestors to be filmed and photographed. One insider close to the production said the protest was not a coordinated stunt to promote the film, about a journalist who travels to the Iranian holy city of Mashhad to investigate a serial killer murdering sex workers.

Cannes has had another protest on the red-carpet, a couple of days after a naked woman demonstrated against violence towards women in Ukraine.