News

Marion Cotillard is set to star in French director Bertrand Mandico’s “Roma Elastica,” a homage to the glory days of Italian cinema that will soon shoot at Rome’s Cinecittà Studios.

The Oscar-winning star of “La Vie en Rose,” and more recently “The Ice Tower” – whose other standout roles titles include “The Dark Knight Rises” and “Inception” – will be appearing in “Roma Elastica” alongside Noémie Merlant (“The Innocent”) and Maurizio Lombardi (“The New Pope”), according to the website of Italy’s promotional film body Filmitalia. Rounding out the “Roma Elastica” cast are vintage Cinema Italiano icons Ornella Muti and Franco Nero (“Django”).

Mandico is an eclectic cult director known for a gender-bending body of work that comprises his debut feature “The Wild Boys,” about five wealthy adolescent boys sent to a tropical island, all played by actresses, which premiered in Venice and topped Cahiers du Cinéma’s 2018 list of Top 10 films.

The cineuropa folks always publish the latest advance on receipts for the Cnc and it gives us taste of what we’ll find in the not so distant future and we’d wager that Bertrand Mandico and Lukas Dhont will likely move into production soon for what would be a likely 2026 drop and seeing that both filmmakers are tied to Cannes having premiered there in the past we think that the chances are indeed plausible for some Croisette love. Announce this past December, Marion Cotillard, Alba Rohrwacher and Jasmine Trinca signed onto topline Mandico’s Roma elastica (revolves around an actress who is going make her last film in Rome in the 1980s) while Dhont has been receiving some early coin support to put towards his third feature film in Coward.…

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We’re pleased to exclusively announce that Altered Innocence has acquired the restoration of the critically lauded queer film By Hook or by Crook ahead of its world premiere restoration screening at the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures on December 5, 2024. Altered Innocence has exclusively acquired all North American rights, with a planned theatrical release in Spring 2025.

By Hook or by Crook marks the feature film debut of three iconic queer filmmakers: film & TV director Silas Howard; author, visual artist and Guggenheim fellow Harry Dodge; and Emmy nominated producer Steak House.

The film’s new restoration will world premiere on Thursday, December 5th, 2024 at the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures as part of their upcoming series Present Past: A Celebration of Film Preservation. Pioneering musician and writer Kathleen Hannah will moderate a post-screening discussion with the filmmakers.

The film has been digitally restored by the Academy Film Archive and UCLA Film & Television Archive...

Taking place August 7-17, the official selection for the 77th Locarno Film Festival has been unveiled, featuring a stellar-looking slate of highly anticipated films. Highlights include Hong Sangsoo’s second feature of the year, By the Stream, starring Kim Minhee, Kwon Haehyo, and Cho Yunhee; Ramon Zürcher’s The Sparrow in the Chimney, Wang Bing’s second part of his Youth trilogy, Youth (Hard Times), as well as new films by Radu Jude, Bertrand Mandico, Courtney Stephens, Ben Rivers, Gürcan Keltek, Denis Côté, Kevin Jerome Everson, Fabrice Du Welz (featuring Abel Ferrara!), and many more. Also of particular note is the world premiere of Tarsem Singh’s restored cut of The Fall, which features a slightly different edit as he recently noted.

Giona A. Nazzaro, Artistic Director of the Locarno Film Festival said, “We are very excited and happy with our selection for Locarno’s 77th edition, which we believe...

The Locarno Film Festival (August 7-17) has revealed the line-up for its 77th edition, with directors including Hong Sangsoo, Wang Bing and Ben Rivers world premiering their latest films in its international competition.

Playing out of competition at Locarno are world premieres from directors including Radu Jude, Fabrice du Welz, Aislinn Clarke, Bertrand Mandico, and Marco Tullio Giordana. Locarno’s famed Piazza Grande screenings include world premieres from Paz Vega, César Díaz and Gianluca Jodice.

Locarno’s international competition comprises 17 films, all of them world premieres, which will vie for the coveted Golden Leopard awards.

Scroll down for full line-up...

The Locarno International Film Festival in Switzerland has unveiled an eclectic lineup for its 77th edition, taking place Aug. 7-17. The fest will screen 225 total films, including 104 world premieres, five international premieres and some debut features, including new films from such directors as Hong Sang-soo, Spanish actress Paz Vega and Radu Jude. Gianluca Jodice’s Le Déluge, starring Mélanie Laurent and Guillaume Canet, will also world premiere and open the fest, with Locarno on Wednesday unveiling that the two French stars will receive the Excellence Award Davide Campari on the fest’s opening night.

Beyond new fare, some of this season’s film festival favorites and classics will screen in Locarno’s main Piazza Grande section, taking place on the town’s main square set up with 8,000 seats. Films to be screened include Cannes hits such as Laetitia Dosch’s Dog on Trial, Mohammad Rasoulof’s The Seed of the Sacred Fig,...

Cannes Critics’ Week, now in its 63rd year, is always an opportunity to explore uncharted work from new and emerging filmmakers — and away from the glitter and glitz of the Croisette, where the main competition bows. Recent Critics’ Week Grand Prize winners have included everything from “Tiger Stripes,” a Malaysian coming-of-age debut opening in stateside theaters later this month, to 2019’s honoree “I Lost My Body,” the animated favorite that went on to be nominated for an Oscar.

Coming up in the Special Screenings category of Critics’ Week, Alexis Langlois makes their feature directorial debut with “Queens of Drama,” a French pop/punk musical that brings a mid-aughts camp sensibility to Cannes this year. Below, IndieWire shares an exclusive clip for the film along with a first-look image. “Queens of Drama” premieres at Critics’ Week on Saturday, May 18, with Charades handling sales.

Per the synopsis, in 2005, Mimi Madamour, the young pop idol,...

Each week we highlight the noteworthy titles that have recently hit streaming platforms in the United States. Check out this week’s selections below and past round-ups here.

After Blue (Bertrand Mandico)

In the post-apocalyptic nightmare of After Blue, humanity—or what’s left of it—roams a former paradise turned wasteland. The Armageddon that wrecked the Earth in some undetermined past left no machines behind, no screens, and, perhaps most conspicuously, no men. In the distant planet the human race fled to, and which writer-director Bertrand Mandico’s film is named after, “they were the first to die,” we’re warned early on: “their hairs grew inside them, and killed them.” As it was for its predecessor, The Wild Boys, After Blue is suffused in a feverish ecstasy, that wild excitement that comes from a watching one world crumble and another jutting into being from scratch, a vision of...

A scene from She Is Conann. Courtesy of Altered Innocence

Let’s begin with the title, She Is Conann. One might expect a distaff approximation of Arnold Schwarzenegger’s 1982 Conan The Barbarian, its sequel Conan The Destroyer two years later, and the zillion, or so, incarnations those spawned in live action or anime over the following 41 years. Or a reboot of 1985’s Red Sonja, in which statuesque Brigitte Nielsen matched Ahnuld’s Kalidor (think Conan Lite) blow-for-blow. But, as the Pythons would say, “And now for something completely different…”

This version comes from France, Belgium and Luxembourg. It’s sort of a post-apocalyptic or alternate universe piece of mysticism, with time travel in the mix. The tale is narrated in a wraparound with an elderly Conann telling her story to a possible successor to her throne, guided by dog-faced vassal, Rainer (Elina Lowensohn). I didn’t mention who plays Conann...

Arnold Schwarzenegger's cult-classic Conan the Barbarian has been reimagined in ultimate queer-cinema glory. The Legend of Conan may not be happening, but it seems the cinematic legend lives on in other ways. Enter She Is Conann (originally titled just "Conann"), a multi-language new feature film that quickly becomes a bold LGBTQ+ celebration. Mainstream viewers might quickly exit, but if you stick with it, experimental filmmaker Bertrand Mandico's new feature also evolves into a symbolic statement on the art world, especially in relation to iconic figures (both real and fictitious).

Barbaric Beauty on Lush 35mm

She Is Conann 3.5/5 Release DateFebruary 4, 2024DirectorBertrand MandicoCastElina Lwensohn, Christa Thret, Julia Riedler, Claire DuburcqRuntime1hr 45minMain GenreActionWritersBertrand MandicoStudioLes Films Fauves, Ecce Films, Flor, al ProsFilming in 35mm with cosmic wardrobes and excellent camera work is a highlight.The slow-burn buildup to the third act is well worth it.Director Bertrand Mandico blends multiple genres...

After the cinematic doldrums of January, February brings surprisingly packed, varied offerings, from Oscar-contending international features to biographical documentaries of legendary film artists to some electrifying genre outings. Check out my picks to see below, and catch up with our Sundance coverage ahead of our Berlinale reviews here.

16. The Monk and the Gun (Pawo Choyning Dorji; Feb. 9)

Returning after his Oscar-nominated directorial debut Lunana: A Yak in the Classroom, Pawo Choyning Dorji’s Ifsn Advocate Award-shortlisted The Monk and the Gun premiered at Telluride and TIFF to much acclaim and will now be released this month. Selected by Bhutan as their Oscar entry, the heartwarming film is about an American in search of a long-lost, vintage gun in Bhutan as the country’s launching a democracy.

15. Ennio (Giuseppe Tornatore; Feb. 9)

The film world lost perhaps its most legendary musician when Ennio Morricone died at the age of 91 in July 2020. Cinema Paradiso director Giuseppe Tornatore,...

French auteur Bertrand Mandico has earned a reputation as one of contemporary cinema's most intriguing and inventive talents. With an extensive portfolio of experimental short films under his belt, Mandico first gained widespread recognition through his feature-length debut, Wild Boys. This film set the stage for his unique cinematic vision, one that employs a surrealistic approach to merge narrative and form in a manner that eschews naturalism. His subsequent work, After Blue, further explored this dreamlike narrative structure, imbued with a complexity of themes. Mandico returned to Locarno with his latest work, She Is Conann (orig. title: Connan),  while also screening the complete Barbarian cycle, in which She Is Conann serves as a central element. Though the film bears a fleeting resemblance to Robert E. Howard's creation, Mandico...

[Read the whole post on screenanarchy.com...]...

Decadent, hermetic, and gleefully hostile to realism, French writer-director Bertrand Mandico’s She Is Conann is the cinematic equivalent of a French Symbolist poem. Throughout, the oneiric imagery seeping from every frame takes precedence over narrative linearity. And yet, even as the film embodies the self-indulgent ideal of art for art’s sake, it devours itself from within and drops the viewer back into the arena of politics.

Lest we forget even for moment that we’re watching a film, She Is Conann is shot in black and white, aside from the sporadic flash of violence and one framing sequence set in hell’s antechamber, where a dead Conann (Françoise Brion) takes stock of her life of barbarism. For her guide, there’s the dog-headed punk clairvoyant Rainer (Elina Löwensohn), whose name could be an allusion to Rainer Maria Rilke or Rainer Werner Fassbinder. Their dialogue at any given moment...

The Wild Boys director Bertrand Mandico returned earlier this year, debuting his 35mm-shot queer fantasy She Is Conann at Cannes Film Festival. Now set for a February 2 release in NY, LA, Chicago, San Francisco, Denver and more, with the director and star Elina Löwensohn in person at NYC’s Anthology Film Archives, the new trailer has arrived from Altered Innocence.

Savina Petkova said in her review, “Following The Wild Boys and After Blue, Conann marks the third feature-length project from prolific shorts filmmaker Bertrand Mandico. Many are still not convinced long-form fits his intense and imaginative style, but what’s certain is that Conann makes one heck of a watch. Part of the self-contained cosmos of Mandico’s explosive vision, this new film is a provocative tale of endurance and self-discovery inspired by the fantasy character Conan the Barbarian (or the Cimmerian). Mandico takes the figure of a sword and...

Forget the riddle of steel, here’s the riddle of glitter: Bertrand Mandico‘s “She Is Conann” finally hits theaters next month after a rousing run on the 2023 festival circuit. Premiering at Cannes and screening at Fantastic Fest, Locarno, and more, Mandico’s latest is a gender-swapped take on Robert E. Howard‘s infamous Conan The Barbarian, immortalized in John Milius‘ 1982 film.

Continue reading ‘She Is Conann’ Trailer: Bertrand Mandico’s Queer Epic Fantasy Takes Select Theaters By Storm On February 2 at The Playlist.

“She Is Conann” is a new science fiction fantasy thriller feature, directed by Bertrand Mandico, starring Claire Duburcq, Christa Théret, Sandra Parfait, Agata Buzek, Nathalie Richard, Françoise Brion, Julia Riedler and Elina Löwensohn, releasing February 2, 2024 in theaters:

“…traveling through the abyss, underworld dog ‘Rainer’ recounts the six lives of ‘Conann’, perpetually put to death by her own future, across eras, myths and ages.

‘Follow her, from her childhood as a slave of ‘Sanja’ and her barbarian horde…

“…to her accession to the summits of cruelty at the doors of our world…”

Click the images to enlarge…...

"Six lives. Six incarnations." Altered Innocence has revealed the US trailer for a wild & crazy experimental French film called She Is Conann, a unique re-imagining of the classic Conan the Barbarian myth through a modern gender-swapped lens. Yes, you read that right! This premireed at the 2023 Cannes Film Festival last year in Directors' Fortnight, with stops at Fantastic Fest and Sitges. It'll be opening in February in New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, San Francisco, Denver, and more, with director Bertrand Mandico and the star at opening weekend showings at Anthology Film Archives in NYC. Conan's life at different stages is shown with a different aesthetic and rhythm from the classic Sumerian era to the near future. The film is a barbaric fantasy sci-fi trip that boldly celebrates the influences of Fellini Satyricon, The Night Porter, The Hunger, and Fassbinder’s entire oeuvre to craft a moving portrait of a warrior...

Fiction's most famous barbarian gets reimagined by avant-garde auteur Bertrand Mandico in the new trailer for She Is Conann. The mind-bending, century-spanning epic will premiere in US theaters on February 2. In the new trailer for Mandico's re-envisioning of the Conan mythos, we see the familiar origins of Conan (or Conann); orphaned and enslaved by the barbarian queen Sanja (Julia Riedler) at a young age, she becomes the fiercest and most cunning warrior of her bygone era.

Experimental French filmmaker Bertrand Mandico isn’t for everyone — i.e. an acquired taste whose visions push boundaries of cinematic expression — but he’s achieved something of a cult fandom over the last three decades. After last pairing with the director on 2022’s “After Blue” and 2017’s uninhibited Venice winner “The Wild Boys” — Cahiers du Cinéma’s top film of 2018 — the distributor Altered Innocence again teams with Mandico on another provocation. His 2023 Cannes premiere “She Is Conann,” nominated for the Queer Palm before going on to play at other festivals including Locarno, is an acid-trip transgressive riff on the Conan the Barbarian myth. IndieWire shares the trailer here.

Influences on the film include Tony Scott’s “The Hunger,” the works of Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Liliana Cavani’s “The Night Porter,” and Fellini’s “Satyricon.” Throw Ken Russell in there for good measure, with profane images in “She Is Conann” reminiscent of “The Devils.

Barbarians, gore, glitter, time travel, humanoid hellhounds, toxic lesbians, and cannibalistic artists are some—but far from all—of the components in Bertrand Mandico’s avant-garde retelling of the Conan the Barbarian mythos. Like Mandico’s trippy sci-fi fantasy After Blue that disturbed Midnight Madness audiences in 2021, She Is Conann thrives on its own bizarre extravagance as it pushes the limits of substance and style.

The Brooklyn Horror Film Festival announced an impressive full slate of programming for its 2023 edition, running October 12-19 with all screenings held at Nitehawk Cinema’s Williamsburg and Prospect Park locations.

From the press release:

Audiences are in for an unearthly lineup of films and events, including the inaugural Leviathan Award, which will be presented to NYC horror legend William Lustig at a special 35th anniversary screening of Maniac Cop, followed by a post-screening conversation with Lustig.

The Opening Night film is the World Premiere of Kill Your Lover from directors Alix Austin and Kier Siewert, who previously announced themselves to the Bhff audience last year with their short film Sucker. The 2023 festival boasts the World Premieres of three more exciting new films: Gaia director Jaco Bouwer’s unsettling Breathing In, Aimee Kuge’s audacious debut Cannibal Mukbang, and Tyler Chipman’s powerfully creepy debut The Shade. The festival’s...

It's the most fantastic time of the year once again, when the fans of the creepy, the weird, the fun, and the bizarre gather in Austin Texas to celebrate a whole week of the best genre cinema has to offer during another iteration of Fantastic Fest.

The ongoing double strike of SAG-AFTRA and the WGA, and the studios' stupid refusal to negotiate already, put all the fall film festivals in doubt. Still, the lineup for this year's Fantastic Fest seems to maintain the expected balance of big genre premieres, international titles, small indies, and all-around weird stuff.

Possibly the biggest announcement is the triumphant return of Mike Flanagan to Austin with the first two episodes of his last Netflix show, "The Fall of the House of Usher," which boasts the most impressive cast for a Flanagan joint yet. The last time the filmmaker was at the festival was with...

Altered Innocence has picked up North American rights to Bertrand Mandico’s gory, transgressive fantasy movie “Conann,” which had its world premiere in Cannes’ Directors’ Fortnight and will soon be making its way to Locarno Film Festival. Kinology is handling world sales.

The film will tour at film festivals throughout the fall and be released theatrically next year.

Following different iterations of the ruthless Connan the Barbarian, the film also stars Elina Löwensohn in canine prosthetics as Rainer, Conann’s spiritual guide.

In the film, guardian of the underworld, Cerberus, still has a muzzle, but here he is called Rainer, and has the breasts and the voice of a woman, wears a studded black leather jacket, and a flash camera fit for the paparazzi. Talking to us from the great beyond, he details the successive reincarnations of Conann the Barbarian, a bloodthirsty Amazon from ancient times.

“A visceral and impulsive queer illusionist,...

Do Not Expect Too Much Of The End Of The World (Radu Jude).The lineup for the 76th edition of the festival has been announced, including new films by Eduardo Williams, Leonor Teles, Lav Diaz, Radu Jude, and others.Concorso INTERNAZIONALEAnimal (Sofia Exarchou)Critical Zone (Ali Ahmadzadeh)Essential Truths of the Lake (Lav Diaz)Home (Leonor Teles)The Human Surge 3 (Eduardo Williams)The Invisible Fight (Rainer Sarnet)Do Not Expect Too Much Of The End Of The World (Radu Jude)Lousy Carter (Bob Byington)Manga D’Terra (Basil Da Cunha)Nuit Obscure – Au Revoir Ici, N’Importe Où (Sylvain George)Patagonia (Simone Bozzelli)The Permanent Picture (Laura Ferrés)Rossosperanza (Annarita Zambrano)Stepne (Maryna Vroda)Sweet Dreams (Ena Sendijarević)The Vanishing Soldier (Dani Rosenberg)Yannick (Quentin Dupieux)Excursion (Una Gunjak).Concorso Cineasti Del PRESENTECamping du Lac (Eléonore Saintagnan)Ein Schöner Ort (Katharina Huber)Excursion (Una Gunjak)Family Portrait (Lucy Kerr)Dreaming...

Get in touch to send in cinephile news and discoveries. For daily updates follow us @NotebookMUBI.NEWSConann.The lineup for the 76th Locarno Film Festival is now online, and it includes new films from Radu Jude, Eduardo Williams, Bertrand Mandico (a feature and two shorts), Leonor Teles, Lav Diaz, and Denis Côté, plus many more. The festival runs from August 2 through 12.Following Barbie, which releases later this month, Greta Gerwig will next direct two Chronicles of Narnia adaptations for Netflix. This news comes as a side detail in a wide-reaching New Yorker piece on Mattel Films by Alex Barasch, which details the toy company’s plans to develop more than 45 films using its properties, including a Hot Wheels film by J.J. Abrams and a Daniel Kaluuya-led, "surrealistic" reboot of the children's show Barney.REMEMBERINGThe great comic actor Alan Arkin died last week at age 89. For the New York Times,...

Following The Wild Boys and After Blue, Conann marks the third feature-length project from prolific shorts filmmaker Bertrand Mandico. Many are still not convinced long-form fits his intense and imaginative style, but what’s certain is that Conann makes one heck of a watch. Part of the self-contained cosmos of Mandico’s explosive vision, this new film is a provocative tale of endurance and self-discovery inspired by the fantasy character Conan the Barbarian (or the Cimmerian). Mandico takes the figure of a sword and sorcery hero––obviously interested in his pulp magazine origins––and fashions a timeless, iterative narrative of phantasmagoric fluidity… and glitter.

Conann is framed by a first-person narration, that of Rainer the hellhound (Elina Löwensohn in impressive dog-faced costume), who roams the netherworld and is suspiciously attracted to the main protagonist, however antagonistic he may appear. But the hero is Conann, a queer rendition of an otherwise masculine symbol,...

How did John Cameron Mitchell become the head of this year’s Queer Palm award jury in Cannes? “Sexual favors,” he quips.

While the director of “Hedwig and the Angry Inch” and “How to Talk to Girls at Parties” (which played out of competition at Cannes) is joking, sexuality is at the heart of one of the world’s most prestigious LGBTQ+ film awards. And with more anti-queer legislation being enacted around the world than at any time in recent memory, the attention it brings to films that humanize this scapegoated population is arguably more important than ever.

“The Queer Palm, the festival and any awards help to dignify work, so that it often can be distributed and sometimes celebrated in its own queer-phobic country,” says Mitchell, who helped start a queer dance night at the American Pavilion in 2004 and DJs when he’s in town. “[The trans-themed] ‘Joyland’ was banned in...

The lineup for the 2023 Directors' Fortnight (Quinzaine des Réalisateurs) at Cannes has been announced. See also the lineup of the Official Selection and Critics' Week.Creatura.Feature FILMSThe Goldman Case (Cédric Kahn)Agra (Kanu Behl)The Other Laurens (Claude Schmitz)Inside the Yellow Cocoon Shell (Thien An Pham)Blackbird Blackbird Blackberry (Elene Naveriani) Blazh (Ilya Povolotsky)She Is Conann (Bertrand Mandico)Creatura (Elena Martín Gimeno)Déserts (Faouzi Bensaïdi)In Flames (Zarrar Kahn) Légua (Filipa Reis and João Miller Guerra)The Book of Solutions (Michel Gondry)Mambar Pierrette (Rosine Mbakam)Riddle of Fire (Weston Razooli)The Feeling That the Time for Doing Something has Passed (Joanna Arnow)The Sweet East (Sean Price Williams)A Prince (Pierre Creton)A Song Sung Blue (Zihan Geng)In Our Day (Hong Sang-soo)Short FILMSThe House Is on Fire, Might as Well Get Warm (Mouloud Aït Liotna)A Storm Inside (Clément Pérot)The Birthday Party (Francesco Sossai...

The Cannes Directors’ Fortnight lineup has been unveiled ahead of this year’s festival.

Set for May 16 through May 27, the Directors’ Fortnight will debut 20 feature films and 10 short films this year.

Cédric Kahn’s “The Goldman Case” is the opening night selection. The film centers on the 1976 trial of left-wing revolutionary Pierre Goldman who was convicted of multiple armed robberies and later murdered.

Korean director Hong Sangsoo’s “In Our Day” will conclude the festival. The feature stars Kim Minhee and Ki Joobong in parallel stories of cat owners grappling with their felines’ respective mortality.

Directors’ Fortnight highlights also include Oscar winner Michel Gondry’s French comedy “The Book of Solutions,” starring Pierre Niney as a filmmaker with writer’s block. The film marks “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind” director Gondry’s first feature in seven years.

“Good Time” director of photography Sean Price William makes his directorial feature...

The Cannes Directors’ Fortnight sidebar has unveiled its 2023 lineup, which will feature new films from arthouse favorites Hong Sang-soo, Michel Gondry and Cédric, Kahn as well as a broad selection from up-and-coming international directors.

Gondry’s French-language comedy The Book of Solutions, the first film in seven years from the Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and The Science of Sleep director, is a clear Fortnight highlight this year. Franz and Yves Saint Laurent star Pierre Niney plays the lead as a director dealing with a creative block. The project was a hot seller for Kinology at the Cannes market last year.

The phenomenally-productive Hong Sangsoo will close this year’s Fortnight section with In Our Day, a drama starring Kim Minhee as a 40-something woman temporarily living at the home of a friend and Ki Joobong as a 70-something man living alone. Both receive visitors, eat noodles, and talk.

After Cannes Film Festival announced its main lineup last week, the Directors’ Fortnight and Critics’ Week sidebars have unveiled their slates. Now in its 55th edition, Directors’ Fortnight features Hong Sangsoo’s second feature of the year, In Our Day, while Sean Price Williams’ The Sweet East, Michel Gondry’s The Book of Solutions, Bertrand Mandico’s She Is Conann, and more.

“The Directors’ Fortnight was born when a community of directors came together with the desire to create an independent space that would encourage the emergence of free filmmaking regardless of geographical provenance or any other limiting criteria,” said Julien Rejl, Artistic Director of the Directors’ Fortnight. “At the heart of the creation of the Directors’ Fortnight was the singular quality of a work of art and the impossibility of pigeonholing it. We have chosen to present 30 films to you which, through their own unique language, embody a spirit...

The sidebar unveiled its 55th selection under new artistic director Julien Rejl on Tuesday (April 18).

Films from Michel Gondry, Hong Sangsoo and Cédric Kahn are among the 19 features set to world premiere at the 55th Cannes Directors’ Fortnight, running May 17-26.

Scroll down for the full selection

Incoming artistic director Julien Rejl unveiled the line-up at a press conference in Paris on Tuesday (April 18) for the non-competitive Cannes parallel section run by French directors guild the Srf.

Rejl said he and his committee chose the films from nearly 4,000 submissions and travelled to more than 20 countries to meet filmmakers and professionals across the globe.

The sidebar unveiled its 55th selection under new artistic director Julien Rejl on Tuesday (April 18).

Projects from Michel Gondry, Hong Sang-Soo and Cédric Kahn are among the 19 features set to world premiere at the 55th Cannes Directors’ Fortnight, running May 17-26.

Scroll down for the full selection

Incoming artistic director Julien Rejl unveiled the line-up at a press conference in Paris on Tuesday (April 18) for the non-competitive Cannes parallel section run by French directors guild the Srf.

Rejl said he and his committee chose the films from nearly 4,000 submissions and travelled to more than 20 countries to meet filmmakers and professionals across the globe.

Cannes Directors’ Fortnight has announced the selection for its 55th edition, running May 17 to 26.

The once renegade Cannes parallel section – launched in 1969 and overseen ever since by the French Directors Guild (Société des Réalisateurs de Films) – will present 20 features and 10 shorts this year. Scroll down for the full list.

The selection is the inaugural line-up of incoming Delegate General Julien Rejl, who was announced as predecessor Paolo Moretti’s replacement last June.

This edition also marks the section’s first outing under the new French name of Quinzaine des Cinéastes.

The name change from Quinzaine des Réalisateurs was announced back in June as a move to make its French-language banner title more gender-inclusive. This year, seven of the 21 filmmakers in the 20-title feature selection are women.

Rejl and his new selection team have pulled together an eclectic line-up mixing confirmed directors, buzzed-about newcomers and a handful of off-the-radar titles.

French...

New films from Hong Sang-soo and Michel Gondry will world premiere at Directors Fortnight, a selection running parallel to the Cannes Film Festival. This edition marks the first under the leadership of Julien Rejl as artistic director.

Succeeding to Paolo Moretti, Rejl was named by the governing body of Directors’ Fortnight, the Srf (Société des réalisateurs de films), as part of a rebranding. Unlike previous artistic directors for this selection, Rejl doesn’t come from the festival circuit. He was previously in charge of distribution, international co-productions and international sales at Capricci, an arthouse film banner based in Paris.

The well-balanced lineup shows his taste for international cinema, with a mix of emerging directors and established masters, such as Hong, who will present his movie “In Our Day” on closing night. The edition will kick off with “The Goldman’s Case,” a thriller directed by actor-turned-helmer Cedric Kahn about the true story of Pierre Goldman,...

Bertrand Mandico’s trippy, erotic, preposterous odyssey is packed full of deranged details that could propel it to cult classic status

‘You must kill Kate Bush!” The order is given on a planet far, far away. And so begins the odyssey at the centre of this trippy, erotic sci-fi fantasy, a film that looks like a horny music video from the 80s, neon-lit and smothered with glitter, the screen filled with erect nipples in quantities not seen since the early seasons of Game of Thrones. It’s French, of course, directed by underground film-maker Bertrand Mandico with such loopy abandon I could almost forgive him the film’s obscenely indulgent two-hour-plus running time.

Kate Bush is not the Kate Bush. Her full name is Katarzyna Buszowska (Agata Buzek), and she’s a Polish outlaw on a post-Earth colony in space populated by women. (The men all died soon after arrival.

Bertrand Mandico’s new film After Blue is a sci-fi head trip that is going to catch the interest of some viewers, while leaving others feeling dried out and bored. It’s a bold effort, to be sure. A drug-fueled fever dream of a film that aims to recapture the strangest of the strange of 70’s science fiction. In some aspects, it’s a success. It has a wild color palette and style that is visually arresting, but as a story, the film fails to pull itself together enough to form a cohesive narrative that will keep most audiences interested.

When humans made the Earth too toxic for habitation, they fled to a far-off planet they dubbed After Blue. Men quickly died out, unable to adapt to the atmosphere of the planet. Women continued to thrive through artificial insemination, living in small, close-knit communities. One day, teenaged Roxy (Paula Luna...

New Release Wall

At the midway point of 2022, it seems difficult to imagine how “Everything Everywhere All at Once” (A24/Lionsgate) wouldn’t be figuring heavily in best-of lists and award chatter come December. The sophomore feature from The Daniels (“Swiss Army Man”) mixes genres and metaphysics with heart and soul to create a hard-to-describe but easy-to-love masterpiece, one that’s not quite like anything else you’ve ever seen. Moving, funny, exciting, mind-bending and always giving you something to look at — including extraordinary performances from Michelle Yeoh, Ke Huy Quan, Stephanie Hsu and Jamie Lee Curtis — this is a one-of-a-kind film that will reward repeat viewings (and a deep dive into the extras on the DVD and Blu-ray).

Also available:

“The Bob’s Burgers Movie” (20th Century Studios): There’s a mystery to solve, a sinkhole to fill, and a restaurant to save in the first big-screen outing for the long-running Fox animated sitcom.

Writer/Director Bertrand Mandico unleashes his wild imagination and flair for the surreal on screen in his trippy, sensual feature After Blue. Mandico fuses the western genre with sci-fi and fantasy, though never as straightforward as that may sound. While the heady plunge into a sumptuous dreamscape offers an immersive sensory experience unlike any other, After Blue’s overindulgent pacing and […]

The post ‘After Blue’ Review – Psychedelic Phantasmagorical Voyage Overstays Its Welcome appeared first on Bloody Disgusting!.

Her name is Roxy, but the village girls call her Toxic. With peroxide-blond hair and the Lolita-like naiveté of a vintage sexploitation-movie heroine, Roxy wanders through a post-apocalyptic world as unfamiliar to us as it is to her — for we have all stepped into the parallel dimension that is underground filmmaker Bertrand Mandico’s erotic imagination. Welcome to the dirty paradise of “After Blue.”

Humans have poisoned Earth and fled to a new planet, which they’ve dubbed After Blue. Screens and machines have since been banished, making way for a kind of old-world mysticism of sparkling dust, psychedelic lights and occult symbols — like a third eye, superimposed over the pubic triangle of the most enlightened. Operating in the mode of Polish porno-surrealist Walerian Borowczyk, Mandico creates sensual mood trips using only practical effects (this one could be the “Barbarella”-style sci-fi film-within-a-film being produced in Mandico’s 2018 meta-textual short...

A voice introduces us to the future: “You are in space,” it says, “...the Earth was sick and rotten.” Bertrand Mandico’s second feature, the comedy-western-fantasy After Blue (Dirty Paradise), is named after a post-Earth home to humanity. This other planet, After Blue, located in another solar system, offers anyone with ovaries—anyone without them dies choked by their own hairs—the hope of a redemption. “If everything is to be done, nothing is to be done again,” declares a sign in the natural wilderness: strict and arbitrary rules are established to “strike the evil at its roots,” as one of the surviving women state. At best phantasmagorical, the dream of a humanity free of evil—through its systematic eradication of one gender—produces distortions where community becomes authoritarian, and purification, commanded.One day on an excursion outside her community, Roxy (Paola Luna) discovers buried in the sand a female...

In the not-so-distant future, on a planet far, far away, a mother and daughter travel across a hostile landscape with one mission and one mission only: to kill Kate Bush.

Don’t worry, it’s not beloved 1980s singer-songwriter Kate Bush, but a once-dormant evil Polish woman named Katajena Bushovsky now spreading violence and hatred. This is the quest at the center of Bertrand Mandico’s new film “After Blue (Dirty Paradise).”

The film’s title comes from its setting: “After Blue (Dirty Paradise)” is an acid space western set on the planet that comes after Earth, and it is indeed a dirty paradise, though more the former than the latter. After Blue is populated only by women, or so we’re informed, and they hoped to start society anew with greater peace and prosperity. No screens, no machines (though there are guns).

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‘Stranger Things’ Catapults Kate Bush...

The long-awaited return of beloved auteurs, new discoveries, decades-in-the-works passion projects, festival winners, and beyond are among June’s major offerings. Check out our picks for what to see below.

15. Watcher (Chloe Okuno; June 3)

Slipping back into a genre she knows well, Maika Monroe leads Chloe Okuno’s Watcher, a slow-burn thriller with a sense of paranoia seeping into every frame. Jake Kring-Schreifels said in his Sundance review, “Ever since It Follows, the 2014 horror movie about a spectral grim reaper stalking a teenage girl, Maika Monroe has become her generation’s avatar of fear and paranoia. Throughout her filmography, she boasts an inner world of melancholy that begins in a delicate register and then multiplies into a feverish anguish the farther her characters tumble down their own rabbit holes. It’s the kind of psychological spiraling that gives oxygen to director Chloe Okuno’s feature debut, Watcher, a chamber piece...

Taste of a Toxic Paradise: Mandico Casts a Dark Spell with Broody Sci-Fi

Through a variety of short films, music videos (including several for M83), and his 2017 feature film, The Wild Boys, Bertrand Mandico fills a transgressive void in his dazzling mutations of arthouse queer aesthetics. Pushing boundaries of sexuality and gender through narrative themes and visual metaphors, his sophomore film After Blue is revisionist Western masquerading as vintage sci-fi, like hallucinogenic Heinlein meets femme-centric Ballard. An ambitious palette dwindles into a trance-inducing odyssey through a strange world’s poisonous hinterlands, where trippy vibes are broken up only by odd jabs of titillation and unfurling desires.…...

Official Selection: Locarno, TIFF Midnight Madness, Fantastic Fest, Sitges Film Festival Awards: Fantastic Fest — Jury Award, Best Fantastic Feature, Locarno — Fipresci Prize, Sitges Film Festival — José Luis Guarner Critic’s Award, Best Film & Special Prize of the Jury, Secció Oficial Fantàstic “Seductive, ethereal, and bizarre… A kaleidoscopic fantasy warped through the lens …

The post Bertrand Mandico’s Award-Winning Queer Sci-Fi Fantasy After Blue (Dirty Paradise) Hits US Theaters June 3rd from Altered Innocence, New Trailer Released appeared first on Horror News | Hnn.

"When she gets here, you'll have to shoot her." Altered Innocence has revealed the US trailer for a French sci-fi film called After Blue (Dirty Paradise), which first premiered at the 2021 Locarno Film Festival. It also played at the Toronto Film Festival, Fantastic Fest, Beyond Fest, and Busan. Everything about it sounds mesmerizing. A chimeric future on After Blue, a planet in another galaxy, a virgin planet where only women can survive in the midst of harmless flora & fauna. The story follows a punitive expedition to the planet. “Seductive, ethereal, bizarre... A kaleidoscopic fantasy warped through the lens of a 1970s sci-fi Western, After Blue is a synthetic siren song for the freaks of the future and the past," one review states. The PR folks add: "the newest vision from Bertrand Mandico (The Wild Boys) plays like a lesbian El Topo (in space!) with stunning 35mm in-camera practical effects, otherworldly set pieces,...

After his delirious, vividly strange debut The Wild Boys, Bertrand Mandico is back with After Blue (Dirty Paradise), which premiered at Locarno Film Festival last year and will now arrive in U.S. theaters starting June 3. Set in a faraway future, on a wild and untamed female inhabited planet called After Blue, the queer sci-fi fantasy romance follows a lonely teenager named Roxy who unknowingly releases a mystical, dangerous, and sensual assassin from her prison. Roxy and her mother Zora (Elina Löwensohn) are held accountable, banished from their community, and forced to track the murderer named Kate Bush down. Haunted by the spirits of her murdered friends, Roxy starts a long journey pacing the supernatural territories of this filthy paradise. Ahead of the release, the new U.S. trailer has now arrived.

Leonardo Goi said in his review, “In the post-apocalyptic nightmare of After Blue, humanity—or what’s left...

Get in touch to send in cinephile news and discoveries. For daily updates follow us @NotebookMUBI.NEWSDesigned by Hartland Villa, the official poster for the 75th edition of the Cannes Film Festival features a still from Peter Weir and Andrew Niccol’s The Truman Show. The festival has also unveiled the lineup for its official selection, which features a hefty list of competitors for the Palme d'Or. Check out the full lineup here.Accompanying the official selection are the Directors' Fortnight and Critics' Week lineups, which are not to be overlooked. Pietro Marcello's French-language debut Scarlet will be opening the Directors' Fortnight, while Yann Gonzalez and July Jung will be premiering new films at Critics' Week. Kelly Reichardt will be receiving an honorary Golden Leopard from this year's Locarno International Film Festival in celebration of her distinguished career, throughout which she's "[redesigned] the profile of genres, from western to thriller,...

Altered Innocence is traveling to After Blue (Dirty Paradise), a nightmarish sci-fi horror fantasy from French filmmaker Bertrand Mandico. that had its premiere at last year’s Toronto International Film Festival. Bloody Disgusting previously scored an exclusive look at the English-language teaser trailer that’s nothing short of spectacular, sparkling with glitter and gold and dropping viewers into […]

The post Altered Innocence Travels to the Glittery Hell of ‘After Blue (Dirty Paradise)’ This June [Trailer] appeared first on Bloody Disgusting!.

In a world drowning in content, independent films give jaded audiences a fresh way to look at the world. Nothing new there. But lately, some of these movies have really gone off the deep end.

In “Lamb,” an Icelandic couple discovers an adorable sheep-baby and attempts to raise it as their own. In “Titane,” a car-show dancer murders a would-be rapist, then turns around and has sex with a tricked-out Cadillac. In “The Green Knight,” a reckless Arthurian hero hacks down a human tree, knowing full well it will cost him his head.

Unconventional as these movies may be, they’re finding an audience today that I would not have thought possible a decade or so ago. Not a huge audience, mind you, but a small yet dedicated segment of the public that’s fed up with formula, hungry for movies with the capacity to surprise, perhaps even to shock.