"The most exciting filmmaker to come out of Ireland since Neil Jordan," is how international film trade paper Variety describes director Lenny Abrahamson in its Cannes edition. Taking a cue from the festival's celebration of its 60th edition this year, Variety chose its "Cannes Fest Zest 60", comprising actors, producers, directors, distributors and sales agents from around the world.
Abrahamson arrives in Cannes this morning for the world premiere of his new movie, Garage, in the prestigious Directors Fortnight section tomorrow evening. He will be joined by the film's star, Pat Shortt, producer Ed Guiney, and screenwriter Mark O'Halloran, who also collaborated with Abrahamson on Adam &Paul.
Coppola to Cannes: respect the family
Given that Francis Ford Coppola belongs among that elite group who have won the Palme d'Or twice (the others are Emir Kusturica, Bille August, brothers Luc and Jean-Pierre Dardenne, and the late Shohei Imamura)
it was widely expected that Coppola would give Cannes his latest movie, Youth Without Youth, his first as a director since The Rainmaker in 1997. The new film is reported to be finished and to have been shown to distributors, but Coppola is giving it instead to the new RomaFilmFest, where it will have its world premiere in October.
The media consensus is that Coppola was not at all pleased at the negative response accorded his daughter Sofia's Marie Antoinette at last year's Cannes, where it was subjected to some booing and failed to collect any awards from the jury.
Brits screened out
Quite a few national noses are out of joint at Cannes this year because certain countries have been shut out of the festival competition for the Palme d'Or, among them Italy, Spain, Australia and Britain. The unkind joke doing the rounds on the Croisette is that the only British film to screen in the Grand Auditorium of the Festival Palais this year is the home movie made by the Rowan Atkinson character and inadvertently shown at the Cannes festival in a sequence from the recent Mr Bean's Holiday.
Still, the president of the festival jury is British, for only the second time in the event's history. The first was Dirk Bogarde in 1984, and this year it's director Stephen Frears, fresh from his success with The Queen.
This week Frears recalled making the 1997 TV documentary, A Personal History of the British Cinema. "I wanted to call it Bollocks to Truffaut, but Channel 4 wouldn't allow me." His original title was prompted by François Truffaut's observation that there was "a certain incompatibility between the terms 'cinema' and 'British'."
A little French can-do in Ireland
Just as the Irish film industry flocks to Cannes on its annual pilgrimage (close on 200 Irish delegates will be here over the weekend) French writer- director Agnès Merlet, who made the Golden Globe- nominated Artemisia (1998), is preparing to shoot her new film in Wicklow and Galway over the next two months. Dorothy Mills, a psychological thriller, deals with a disturbed young woman suspected of assaulting a baby in a rural village.
Carice von Houten, the spirited star of Black Book, will play the psychiatrist on the case, and the rest of the cast will be announced shortly. James Flynn of Irish company Octagon Films is co-producing it with Paris-based Fidélité Films.
Meanwhile, at the Salerno Film Festival in Italy last weekend, Irish writer-director David Gleeson collected the best film award for his Dublin thriller, The Front Line, which went on Irish release last autumn.
Beyond parody
The Eurovision Song Contest, which at 52 is just eight years younger than Cannes, is finally set to become the subject of a movie. Working Title Films, the British company behind United 93, Four Weddings and a Funeral and the Bridget Jones movies, has given the green light to Damian Jones, producer of The History Boys, and Borat co-writer Dan Mazer to develop Eurovision: The Movie, which, we are promised, will be a comedy.
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