Cannes Review: Jerzy Skolimowski’s ‘EO’

Peter Debruge Chief Film CriticHer name is Roxy, but the village girls call her Toxic. With peroxide-blond hair and the Lolita-like naiveté of a vintage sexploitation-movie heroine, Roxy wanders through a post-apocalyptic world as unfamiliar to us as it is to her — for we have all stepped into the parallel dimension that is underground filmmaker Bertrand Mandico’s erotic imagination.

EXCLUSIVE: Ellen Wander’s Film Bridge International has sold shark survival thriller Maneater to a host of buyers during the Cannes market including Saban Films (North America, UK, Australia/NZ, Scandinavia and South Africa), Challan Films (Korea), Superfine Films (India), YouPlanet (Spain), ILY Films (France), Monolith (Poland), Suraya Filem (SE Asia), Blitz Film Group (Ex-Yugo), and Selim Ramia and Co. (Middle East).

Manori Ravindran International EditorCannes sensation “EO,” which tells the story of a donkey’s life, has been acquired for North America by Sideshow and Janus Films. The film is the latest collaboration for the U.S.

Reteaming after last year’s collaboration on Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s Oscar-winning Drive My Car, Sideshow and Janus Films have acquired North American rights to veteran auteur Jerzy Skolimowski’s EO, which won the Jury Prize in Cannes this past weekend. A fall theatrical release is planned.

EXCLUSIVE: Coda producer Pathé has concluded a raft of sales on its Cannes slate including for starry French drama Masquerade, Directors’ Fortnight entry Paris Memories and Penelope Cruz title L’Immensita.

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.

Guy Lodge Film CriticAny number of directors could have shot Andrea Seigel’s straightforwardly moving screenplay for “The Silent Twins” and turned out a straightforwardly moving film in the process. It’s hard to imagine any of those movies looking, sounding or feeling quite like the one Agnieszka Smoczyńska has made, however.

Polish filmmaker Agnieszka Smoczynska (The Lure, Fugue) makes her english language debut with The Silent Twins, the strange and remarkable story of June and Jennifer Gibbons, twin sisters who only communicated with each other from 8 to later teen years when drugs and drinking led to petty theft and an arson charge that landed them in the tightly secured medical ward of Broadmoor  for 11 years before being released in the 1980’s. Creating their own puppetry and dolls, poems, and music which they only broadcast for each other on a fake radio program, the “twinies” as they were called by family fell into an odd void that became more pronounced, even when they were forced to go to separate schools at one point, and they carried on this way until becoming young women landing into legal troule  until incredibly being incarcerated for over a decade, five or six times as long as the longest sentence for the petty crimes of which they were accused.

Elsa Keslassy International CorrespondentREinvent International Sales has closed major territory sales on “UFO Sweden,” a science fiction movie adventure from Crazy Pictures, a Swedish film collective whose past credits includes the 2018 hit movie “The Unthinkable.”Described as a mix between “X-Files” and “Stranger Things,” “UFO Sweden” is set in a small town and follows a teenage rebel placed in foster care, who suspects that her father is not dead, but has been kidnapped by UFOs. With the help from a UFO association, she is determined to find out the truth.

JD Linville Swiss filmmaker Lionel Baier (“Stealth,” “Longwave”) has completed the third movement in his sweeping film tetralogy concerning Europe with “Continental Drift (South).” The film, which debuts at the Cannes Directors’ Fortnight, sees Baier shifting his focus southward to Sicily in 2020, just prior to the COVID-19 pandemic and deep within the European migrant crisis.Isabelle Carré (“Remembering Beautiful Things,” “Mademoiselle Else”) plays Nathalie Adler, who has been dispersed to a migrant camp in Catania, Sicily ahead of a visit from Macron and Merkel only to find her pugnacious son Albert, played by Canadian Théodore Pellerin (“Genesis,” “My Salinger Year”) working against her interests as an activist. The film, which is produced by Bandita Films with RTS and Les Films du Losange handling sales, strikes a balance between political satire and heartfelt drama, as Nathalie and Albert push and pull, magnetic at the edges of their estrangement.

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.  

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.

CANNES – It may seem obvious, but sometimes combining two compelling stories doesn’t lead to an overall more captivating film. That’s the primary takeaway from Gina Gammell and Riley Keough‘s somewhat messy “War Pony,” which debuted at the 2022 Cannes Film Festival this weekend.

CANNES – We are living in yet another era of European history where old battles over the borders of nation-states are being disputed. Russia has invaded the sovereign nation of Ukraine after already annexing the province of Crimea less than a decade ago.

streaming, the limited series follows Angelyne (Emmy Rossum, “Shameless”), nee Ronia Tamar Goldberg, who, for decades, has been an iconic curiosity driving around in her pink Corvette (think a more Hollywood version of the infamous Times Square Naked Cowboy) and appearing on billboards where it wasn’t clear what she was advertising — aside from her own desire for everyone to know her face. As depicted from a nearly unrecognizable Rossum (who’s buried beneath a platinum bouffant, fake chest and Minnie Mouse voice), Angelyne’s aesthetic is part Dolly Parton, part Barbie. The show compares her to a prototype of figures who are “famous for being famous” such as Paris Hilton and Kim Kardashian.

There’s always at least one. Just a few nights deep into this year’s Cannes Film Festival, the competition has thrown up its first wild, batshit, and occasionally beautiful curiosity.

exercice de style as the French would put it, “EO” has plenty on its mind and nothing much to say, idling through a series of vignettes than more often not end with a punch-line of a forbidden kiss or a sudden act of violence, capturing them all with a flashy and urgent style of a music video or Super Bowl car commercial. One need not look far to see in this tale of a lonely beast of burden traipsing across the countryside a condemnation of modern Polish society, especially in sequences when the titular donkey first witnesses and then succumbs to a bout of skinhead hooligan violence, or when it clops across a forest bed we soon learn was once a Jewish burial site. At the same time, Skolimowski – who shot this project over a two-year period – seems more interested in simply making his camera swoop and soar and generally perform its series of stupid pet tricks. In many ways, this rather silly (if quite entertaining) trifle makes for a fitting entry for Cannes’ 75th edition. Skolimowski approaches the material with the hunger and zeal of a young film student, lifting a framework from Robert Bresson and filtering through references to recent festival provocateurs like Lars von Trier, Refn, and Michael Haneke.

Peter Debruge Chief Film CriticGive an animal a name, and it becomes a lot more difficult to send it to the glue factory. But people don’t stop using paste simply because they’ve made an equine friend. Named for the animal it follows from owner to owner, through various hardships and across national borders, “EO” is a damning polemic on our relationship to other intelligent species — as free labor, food and companions — as seen through the dewy, wide eyes of a donkey whom we come to adore.“EO’s” inspiration is obvious.

A young man struggles to provide for his family in Harka, Lotfy Nathan’s debut feature screening in Un Certain Regard at the Cannes Film Festival. Set in Tunisia, it’s a quietly absorbing portrait of one man’s life in the wake of his father’s death.