France, Media Satire at Festival de Cannes

France team with Bruno Dumont ©YesICannes.com

The Competition is in its final stages on the tenth day of the Festival de Cannes with Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Memoria, Bruno Dumont’s France and Nabil Ayouch’s Casablanca Beats.

Eleven years after winning the Palme d’Or for Uncle Boonmee, Thai director Apichatpong Weerasethakul returns to the Competition with Memoria, a “sensory journey” on memory and solitude. After Jeanne, Special Mention of the Jury Un Certain Regard in 2019, Bruno Dumont enters the Competition this time with France, a satire of the media world. Nine years after Les Chevaux de Dieu at Un Certain Regard, Moroccan director Nabil Ayouch enters the Competition with Casablanca Beats.

Léa Seydoux – France © 3B

Reality reworked by the media

France is France de Meurs, a famous television journalist played by Léa Seydoux (soon to be a James Bond girl in “Mourir peut attendre”). The star journalist of a 24-hour news channel, adored for her shock reports, will nevertheless experience setbacks and a fall. Caught up in a spiral of events, France is disillusioned by a hyper-connected, hypertrophied and unhealthy system, which, according to Dumont, “transforms reality into fiction, and reality into a parallel world, reworked and staged. Between drama and comedy, France, by the director of P’tit Quinquin, is adapted from a work by Charles Péguy.

Haut et Fort – © Virginie Surdej et Amine Messadi

Breaking free from the weight of tradition

A first in the history of Moroccan cinema: Casablanca Beats (Haut et Fort) by Nabil Ayouch is selected for the Official Competition. The film gives a voice to young people, and stages them in music. This enthusiastic, modern and political Moroccan youth shows its desire to free itself from the country’s heavy traditions. The film tells the story of Anas, a former rapper, who became involved in the cultural centre of Sidi Moumen, a working-class district of Casablanca, the first one created by the director’s foundation.

Tilda Swinton – Memoria © Kick The Machine

A quest for memory

Filmed in the mountains of Pijao and in Bogota, the Colombian capital, Thai filmmaker Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Memoria invites the viewer on a sensory journey. The director, who considers cinema to be an instinctive art form and likes to compare its power to that of a shamanic form, capable of bewitching our spirits, was interested in the physical manifestation of sound and its impact on our memory. Tilda Swinton plays a woman obsessed with a mysterious bang, a sound she strives to recreate, as the key to her memory quest.