The Cailín Ciúin team is back
Away from Cannes film festival’s official competition and satellite strands, the Marché du Film, or film market, centred at a bazaar in the basement of the Palais des Festivals et des Congrès convention centre, is where all the real business gets done.
Screen International has identified Colm Bairéad’s Mary Rose, follow-up to his Oscar-nominated An Cailín Ciúin, as one of “the buzziest projects from France available to international buyers”.
Fear not. Bairéad has not run off to make a romantic comedy in Toulouse. The new film, set in 1950s Ireland, qualifies as French thanks to a financing deal with the Paris-based distributor and production company MK3 Films.
Break Out Pictures, which had such startling success with An Cailín Ciúin, and Curzon, among the busiest British distributors, will distribute in Ireland and the UK. Deals have also been struck for France and the Benelux nations. Screen Ireland and RTÉ are among the financiers. Cleona Ní Chrualaoí returns as producer.
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From an original script by Bairéad, Mary Rose stars Zara Devlin, so good in Small Things Like These, as a young woman forced to cope with burdensome responsibilities when her twin sister emigrates to England.
Unlike An Cailín Ciúin, an Irish-language phenomenon, the picture is reported to be in English. “With The Quiet Girl, Colm Bairéad emerged as one of the most distinctive and emotionally precise film-making voices in recent years, and Mary Rose builds powerfully on that,” Fionnuala Jamison, managing director of MK2 Films, said.
The film is set to shoot in Ireland later this year.
Barry Keoghan loves Cannes
Barry Keoghan now counts as part of the Cannes furniture. Amazingly, it is a full nine years since I talked to him on the roof of the Palais as Yorgos Lanthimos’s Killing of a Sacred Deer premiered to raves. “You killing a cat again?” a PR person joked as he settled in for the interview. Yes, the memory of Wayne in Love/Hate still lingers.
He returned with Andrea Arnold’s Bird in 2024 and, this year, got to open Directors’ Fortnight with Kantemir Balagov’s Butterfly Jam.
He was at the Croisette Theatre – home of the Fortnight – in a baggy shirt with a stills camera hanging around his neck.
The film is the first project backed by Wolfcub Productions, his own company, to reach its premiere.
The Cannes buzz still affects him. “You just feel it as soon as you land,” he told The Hollywood Reporter. “All the people that have been there before you, the historic moments it’s had, and it’s just classy. I went with Yorgos for the first time, and I loved it. I brought my film camera, my Canon, and I took pictures. And it’s just beautiful. It’s a celebration.”
Reviews of Butterfly Jam, in which Keoghan stars as a harried member of New Jersey’s Circassian community, have been mixed, but that’s unlikely to dampen his ambitions to direct.
“I’d love to. I don’t think people would understand what I’m saying, though,” he said. “Most of the time on set would be spent on that, me getting people to understand what I’m saying.”
Panic at the Marriott
Security has greatly heightened at the festival over the past 10 years. Once, if you had the right badge, you swanned through all designated doorways. There is now a sense of constant vigilance. Bag searches everywhere. Armed police on the streets.
Little surprise that some level of panic seemed to have broken out when a mighty crash interrupted Variety’s “Welcome to Cannes” party on the rooftop of the JW Marriott hotel. “It felt as if the floor rumbled and moved, and the building. It was terrifying. Some people screamed,” someone puffed to the Daily Mail.
The veteran gossip site Page Six had even more petrifying reports. “The whole thing shook violently three or four times,” their unnamed witness quaked. “Everyone just f**king freaked out and was scrambling to get out and leave. It was panicked and crazy … People were shoving at the beginning, drinks were being spilled. No one made an announcement. Everyone was equally scared.”
The source of the noise has not yet been confirmed,but it seems no celebrities were injured. Phew.
The Fast and the Furious brings the noise
Out there in the social media there’s debate about whether it matters that mainstream Hollywood is largely missing from Cannes this year.
Those saying blockbusters don’t belong in such an exalted place seem to have missed the festival’s long embrace of the noisiest studio product. Shrek 2 was once in competition, you know? The festival compensated this year by inviting the folk behind The Fast and the Furious, the relatively intimate chase movie that launched a mammoth franchise, to La Croisette for a 25th-anniversary screening.
Vin Diesel was visibly moved at the Palais as he paid tribute to the late cast member Paul Walker. “I pray that in your life you can have a brother like Paul,” he said. He revealed that, 31 years ago, he came to Cannes with a short film and “a laundry bag as a suitcase”. The hooting and the hollering at a packed Grand Lumiere Theatre confirmed the event’s enthusiasm for biff and bang.
