Nitram, Itinerary of a Killer at the Cannes Film Festival

The Restless ©YesICannes.com

The Official Competition of the Cannes Film Festival ends with Justin Kurzel’s Nitram and Joachim Lafosse’s The Restless.

D-1 before the Palme d’or… After Macbeth, Australian director Justin Kurzel returns to the competition with Nitram, a chilling film that follows the itinerary of Martin Bryant, the perpetrator of the 1996 Port Arthur massacre in Tasmania, which plunged Australia into mourning. Les Intranquilles, the fourth Cannes participation of Belgian filmmaker Joachim Lafosse, deals with the consequences of the illness – bipolarity – on the bond of love in a couple.

Nitram © GoodThing Productions

Reflection on the carrying of weapons

Justin Kurzel likes to recreate violent events. In 2011, in The Crimes of Snowtown (Critics’ Week), he reconstructed the journey of John Bunding, a neo-Nazi serial killer who hunted homosexuals in the 1990s. In 2020, in The Kelly Gang, he portrayed Ned Kelly, a contested folk hero of the late 19th century, hero of the revolution against the British for some, bloodthirsty killer for others. In his films, Justin Kurzel endeavours to shed light on the psychological mechanisms that lead to violence. In Nitram, the reflection is on the carrying of weapons, for which Australia, following the Port Arthur massacre (35 deaths), introduced legislation considered to be the strictest in the world, which led to the return of 600,000 weapons.

The Restless © Stenola Productions

An intimate drama

Joachim Lafosse presented A perdre la raison in 2012 in Un Certain Regard, which won Emilie Dequenne the Best Actress Award) and La Quinzaine des Réalisateurs selected two of his films: Elève libre in 2008 and L’Economie du couple in 2016. In The Restless, two French actors, Leïla Bekhti and Damien Bonnard, play a couple whose daily life is disrupted by the bipolarity of one of Damien, and question the limits of commitment to love: how far can you support someone who is going wrong?