The Cannes Film Festival will have a strong UK presence in 2023, with directors Ken Loach, Molly Manning Walker, Steve McQueen and Jonathan Glazer all heading to the Croisette, plus a peppering of heavyweight UK-produced titles in Official Selection. It follows the 2022 Competition in which no films by UK directors made the cut.
Two-time Palme d’Or winner Loach is in competition, as expected, with The Old Oak. Loach’s 15th film at the French festival focuses on the arrival of Syrian refugees to a once thriving, now struggling mining town in the northeast of England, and the unfolding of an unlikely friendship between the two communities. It is produced by Rebecca O’Brien’s UK outfit Sixteen Films with France’s Why Not, and was made with the support of the BFI and BBC Film, in co-production with Belgium’s Les Films du Fleuve.
Former Screen Star of Tomorrow Manning Walker is another Cannes returner – her first short film as director Good Thanks, You? premiered at Cannes, and she won the Next Step prize for the How To Have Sex script. Now, her debut feature How To Have Sex will play in Un Certain Regard. It follows a group of teenage girls as they navigate early sexual encounters on a rite-of-passage clubbing holiday. Film4 and the BFI developed and financed the production, alongside France’s mk2 Films, which handles international sales. Ivana MacKinnon and Emily Leo of the UK’s Wild Swim Films are producing alongside Heretic’s Konstantinos Kontrovrakis from Greece.
Glazer will make his Cannes competition debut with A24 and Film4 title The Zone Of Interest. It’s billed as a Holocaust drama that draws on UK writer Martin Amis’ novel of the same name, starring German actors Sandra Hüller and Christian Friedel.
McQueen will appear in Special Screenings with Occupied City. The London-born, Amsterdam-based Caméra d’Or winner (the first UK director to win this award) returns with his feature documentary about Amsterdam under Nazi occupation during World War II. UK backing comes from Film4, and it is co-produced by McQueen’s London-based outfit Lammas Park. Further financing comes from US outfits A24 and New Regency, plus Netherlands Film Fund, Mondriaan Fund and Amsterdam Fund for the Arts from the Netherlands.
The UK presence is further bolstered by Club Zero. This is the second English-language feature from Austrian filmmaker Jessica Hausner, with the majority of the boarding school-set feature produced in Oxford, plus some additional scenes in Austria. Mike Goodridge is the UK producer on the project, which is a co-production with Austria, Germany, France and Denmark. BBC Film is among the backers.
Emily Morgan of Quiddity Films is the UK producer on Felipe Galvez’s English-language Chilean western The Settlers, with UK funding from the BFI’s UK Global Screen Fund and Finite Films. It is a co-production with Chile (Quijote), Argentina (Rei Cine), France (Cine-Sud), Germany (Sutor Kolonko) and Denmark (Snowglobe), with a cast featuring UK actors Mark Stanley and Sam Spruell.
There’s also Brazilian filmmaker Karim Aïnouz’s English-language debut Firebrand – a psychological horror set in a bloody Tudor court – that is written by former Screen Stars of Tomorrow Jessica and Henrietta Ashworth, and produced by Gabrielle Tana for the UK’s Brouhaha Films and and Carolyn Marks Blackwood for MagnoliaMae Films. Jude Law, Alicia Vikander, Simon Russell Beale and Sam Riley star.
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