Cannes 2021 line-up guide: Cannes Premiere titles

Cow (UK)

Dir Andrea Arnold
Arnold won the Cannes jury prize with her debut feature Red Road (2006), and again with Fish Tank (2009) and American Honey (2016). She now presents her first feature documentary, described by the director as “a film about one dairy cow’s reality and acknowledging her great service to us”. Sound Of Metal Oscar winner Nicolas Becker serves as supervising sound editor. Kat Mansoor (SXSW 2012 entry Lost And Sound) produces for Halcyon Pictures, with backing from BBC Film and Doc Society. Submarine (North America) and mk2 Films (rest of world) handle sales.
Contacts mk2 Films; Submarine Entertainment

Deception (Fr)

Dir Arnaud Desplechin
Desplechin has played in Competition six times, beginning with 1992’s The Sentinel and most recently with 2019’s Oh Mercy!. But this year he is appearing in the festival’s newest section — described by Cannes delegate general Thierry Frémaux as “a place for the big directors to show their work without the pressure of the Competition” — with his latest film, an adaptation of the 1990 novel by the late US author Philip Roth and a seemingly autobiographical fiction about the complicated love life of a writer. Léa Seydoux and Denis Podalydes are joined by Anouk Grinberg and Emmanuelle Devos, with Yorick Le Saux as cinema­tographer. Pascal Caucheteux produces for Why Not Productions.
Contact Antoine Guilhem, Wild Bunch International

Evolution (Hun-Ger)

Dir Kornel Mundruczo
Mundruczo has played in Competition three times, and in Un Certain Regard twice, winning the latter section’s top prize in 2014 with White God. Following a Venice bow for last year’s Pieces Of A Woman (which netted Vanessa Kirby Bafta and Oscar nominations, as well as Venice’s best actress prize), the Hungarian filmmaker is back in Cannes with a drama tracking three generations of a Jewish family from the end of the Second World War in Budapest to present-day Berlin. Match Factory Productions and Budapest’s Proton Cinema KFT produce.
Contact The Match Factory

Hold Me Tight (Fr)

Dir Mathieu Amalric
One of the most visible actors in Cannes since the 1990s, the indefatigable Amalric here continues a versatile directing career that previously included burlesque drama On Tour (Competition, 2010), Georges Simenon adaptation The Blue Room and chanteuse biopic Barbara (Un Certain Regard 2014 and 2017, respectively). His new film stars Vicky Krieps and Belgian actor Arieh Worthalter and is an adaptation of a work by dramatist Claudine Galéa, about a woman who walks out on her family.
Contact Alexis Cassanet, Gaumont

In Front Of Your Face (S Kor)

Dir Hong Sangsoo
Korean filmmaker Hong, whose Hahaha won the Un Certain Regard prize in 2010, is on the Croisette for the eleventh time with his latest feature. Starring Lee Hyeyoung, Cho Yunhee and Kwon Haehyo, it is the story of a woman harbouring a secret who returns suddenly to Korea to stay with her sister. Once there, she meets up for a drink with a director whose project she has refused to join. Hong’s own Jeonwonsa Film Co produces.
Contact Finecut

Jane By Charlotte (Fr)

Dir Charlotte Gainsbourg
Gainsbourg has long been a regular on the Cannes red carpet, with films spanning Paolo and Vittorio Taviani’s Night Sun in 1990, Lars von Trier’s Antichrist (for which she won the best actress prize) and most recently Gaspar Noé’s Lux Æterna in 2019. She goes behind the camera for the first time for this documentary charting her relationship with her mother Jane Birkin, the equally famous actress/director/singer who has also been a frequent guest of Cannes in films including Jacques Rivette’s La Belle Noiseuse (1991) and her sole feature as director, Boxes (2007).
Contact The Party Film Sales

JFK Revisited: Through The Looking Glass (US)

Dir Oliver Stone
Triple Oscar winner Stone brings his first film to Cannes since Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps 11 years ago, and digs deep into one of his great obsessions. JFK Revisited: Through The Looking Glass is a documentary companion piece to his 1991 feature JFK and is based on declassified files about the Kennedy assassination. Ingenious Media funded the project, which Stone has also made as a four-part documentary miniseries.
Contact Altitude Film Sales

Love Songs For Tough Guys (Fr-Bel)

Dir Samuel Benchetrit
Novelist/director Benchetrit made a splash on the festival circuit with 2007 comedy I Always Wanted To Be A Gangster, and had a Cannes Special Screenings slot with 2015’s Macadam Stories (Asphalte), based on one of his Asphalt Chronicles books and starring Isabelle Huppert. His latest features an ensemble cast including Francois Damiens, Vanessa Paradis and Valeria Bruni Tedeschi, and follows a group of lovestruck characters in the sometimes brutal setting of a container port.
Contact Orange Studio

Marx Can Wait (It)

Dir Marco Bellocchio
A guest of honour at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, veteran Italian auteur Bellocchio will be presented with an honorary Palme d’Or at the festival’s closing ceremony. His A Leap In The Dark scooped acting awards at Cannes for Michel Piccoli and Anouk Aimée in 1980, and the director was selected for Competition six more times, most recently with The Traitor (2019). Bellocchio’s latest is a very personal documentary — his attempt to understand the suicide of his fraternal twin at the age of 29, blending clips of his own films and conversations with people close to him.
Contact The Match Factory

Mothering Sunday (UK)

Dir Eva Husson
France’s Husson — who grabbed industry attention with her provocative debut feature about French teens Bang Gang: A Modern Love Story (2015) and played in Competition in 2018 with Girls Of The Sun — makes her English-language feature debut with an adaptation of Graham Swift’s 2016 novella Mothering Sunday, scripted by Alice Birch (Lady Macbeth, TV’s Normal People and Succession). Odessa Young stars as a maid in 1920s England in love with an unattainable man (Josh O’Connor); Olivia Colman and Colin Firth play her employers. Number 9 Films’ Elizabeth Karlsen and Stephen Woolley produce, with backing from Film4, BFI and Lipsync Productions. Lionsgate distributes in the UK, Transmission Films in Australia, and Sony Pictures Classics in North America, Latin America and select other territories.
Contact Rocket Science

Val (US)

Dirs Ting Poo, Leo Scott
Over the past four decades Val Kilmer — the actor who more recently beat throat cancer and later this year reprises his iconic role as Iceman in Top Gun: Maverick — shot thousands of hours of film and video documenting his personal and professional life. Feature debutants and longtime editors Poo and Scott trawled through the footage and assembled this documentary, produced by A24. Amazon Studios acquired US and Latin America, and A24 controls all remaining global rights.
Contact A24

Vortex (Fr-Bel-Monaco)

Dir Gaspar Noé
Little has been released so far about the new film from Argentina-born, France-based provocateur Noé, other than it stars horror filmmaker Dario Argento (Suspiria, Tenebrae) and is billed as a ‘quasi-documentary’ about a loving couple coping with senility. Noé is no stranger to Cannes: all six of his previous films from I Stand Alone (1998) onwards have made their debuts on the Croisette, with Irreversible (2002) and Enter The Void (2009) playing in Competition.
Contact Antoine Guilhem, Wild Bunch International 

Cannes profiles by Nikki Baughan, Charles Gant, Melanie Goodfellow, Elaine Guerini, Jeremy Kay, Lee Marshall, Wendy Mitchell, Jean Noh, Jonathan Romney, Michael Rosser, Silvia Wong

• Read profiles for the other Cannes 2021 titles here