Cannes looks beyond Hollywood as US film-makers mostly fail to make the grade

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The 79th edition of the influential festival boasts an auteur-heavy lineup – with one, very big, country conspicuous by its almost total absence

Has Europe fallen out of love with the US? Has Cannes fallen out of love with Hollywood? Will the festival, like Nato, become a non-American institution? Either way, the annual announcement of the Cannes selection has revealed a list that skews away from Hollywood towards a renewed dominance of world-cinema auteurs and heavy hitters, including Pedro Almodovar, Cristian Mungiu and Asghar Farhadi. There’s certainly nothing to compare with last year’s Tom Cruise Mission: Impossible extravaganza, although there are directorial debuts out of competition for Andy Garcia (also starring) with his crime drama Diamond, and John Travolta directs Propeller One-Way Night Coach, expressing his love of aviation, based on his own novel. There are no British directors announced (as yet), although Polish auteur Paweł Pawlikowski, in competition with his Thomas Mann biopic Fatherland, could be cheekily claimed for the UK as he lived here for a long time.

Festival watchers and Cannesologists will be looking for the contemporary relevances and the now familiar talking points. The festival, under director Thierry Frémaux, has stuck to its refusal to admit streamer-only movies and won the argument by seeing its films do well at the Oscars. On the AI debate, perhaps Cannes is less purist. Steven Soderbergh’s documentary John Lennon: The Last Interview is based on John and Yoko’s final three-hour interview for RKO Radio shortly before Lennon’s murder, and for the visuals Soderbergh has reportedly used AI to reconstruct and reimagine the encounter. Some are intrigued, others uneasy.

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