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Kodi (Cosmos) is in trouble. He has bitten two women, which means that, according to French law, he should be ‘destroyed’. His human, Dariuch (François Damiens), is homeless and ungroomed and lacking in social skills; he’s desperate to save him but inadvertently makes the worst possible impression on everyone. He has no idea where to turn for help – until he hears about soft-hearted young lawyer Avril Lucciani (Laetitia Dosch), who has gained a reputation for taking on hopeless cases. When he leaves Kodi alone with her for a moment, the dog pleads his own case.

In a US film with this opening, it would be clear how the story would go. It might well be very enjoyable, but, well, you’ve seen that before. This film is based on real events and its director takes a very different approach. Be warned : there are parts of it that will break your.

“Dog on Trial” is a Swiss/France co-production, directed by Laetitia Dosch, starring Dosch as a lawyer who defends a dog on trial, based on a real case in France, streaming July 25, 2025 on digital platforms:

“…’Avril’ is an idealistic lawyer with a predilection for hopeless cases. She agrees to defend the dog ‘Cosmos’, who has bitten three people, leading to the first canine trial since the Middle Ages.

“She feels the pressure to win the case, as otherwise her unusual client will be put down…”

Click the images to enlarge…...

MetFilm Distribution has debuted the trailer for filmmaker Claude Barras’s animation ‘Savages.’

At the edge of Borneo’s vast rainforest, Kéria rescues a baby orangutan found in the palm plantation where her father works. Together with her young cousin Selaï, who comes to live with them, seeking refuge from the conflict between his indigenous tribe and the logging companies, the trio bravely overcome every obstacle in their battle against the planned destruction of the rainforest, their ancestral home.

Voice cast includes Babette De Coster (Keria), Martin Verset (Selaï), Laëtitia Dosch (Jeanne), Benoît Poelvoorde (Mutang) and Pierre-Isaïe Duc (Along Sega). Nicolas Burlet produces ‘Savages’ with co-producers Laurence Petit, Barbara Letellier, Carole Scotta, Vincent Tavier, Hugo Deghilage, Annemie Degryse, and Olivier Glassey.

Also in trailers – Teaser trailer is served for ‘Downton Abbey: The Grand Finale’

The movie will be released in cinemas across the UK and Ireland on 1st August, both...

Exclusive: Anas Khalaf and Rana Kazkaz’s Mare Nostrum and The Translator count among the rare fiction works made by Syrian directors tackling the 2011 democracy protests and President Bashar al-Assad’s brutal 14-year campaign to crush them.

The husband-and-wife team’s allegorical short film Mare Nostrum (2020) tapped into the resulting Mediterranean Sea migrant crisis as people fled the conflict, with Ziad Bakri playing a harrowed father who inexplicably throws his young daughter into the sea.

Political thriller The Translator (2020) explored the early days of the revolution and the decades of oppression that preceded it, through the tale of a political refugee living in Australia who returns to Syria in search of his brother after he is arrested by the authorities for protesting.

Khalaf is now in the late stages of development on Beirut and Bekaa Valley-set tennis-themed fiction feature Love-45, which he has been presenting to potential production and sales...

Days ahead of the anticipated press conference unveiling the lineup, Cannes Film Festival’s chief Thierry Fremaux has managed to keep a certain mystery around this year’s Official Selection, despite the numerous predictions flourishing on social media.

Even “Mission Impossible: The Final Reckoning” hasn’t been officially confirmed by neither Cannes nor Paramount, but Fremaux tells Variety in an exclusive interview that he’s hoping to get a final go from the studio soon.

Rolling off back-to-back milestone editions that saw Cannes-bowing films go on to win Oscars, such as “Anatomy of a Fall” and “The Zone of Interest” in 2023 and “Anora,” “The Substance,” “Emilia Perez” and “Flow” in 2024, Fremaux suggests he’s received a record number of movies, especially from the U.S.

While some have suggested that the 2025 edition feels like the first post-strike Cannes, Fremaux says it “seems that Hollywood is in a period of transition.

Klaudia Reynicke’s Reinas (Queens), a Peruvian-set period drama about a family navigating political turmoil, has won best film at the 2025 Swiss Film Awards, presented in Geneva Friday night. The Swiss-Peruvian-Spanish coproduction premiered at Sundance last year and won best film in the Kplus Generation children’s film sidebar of the Berlinale, as well as the audience award at the Locarno Film Festival.

Set during a tumultuous summer in Lima in 1992, Reinas chronicles the unsteady reunion between a father and his two daughters. Over the course of a series of slow summer days, the family begins to grow closer even as the country begins to fall apart as inflation skyrockets.

Reinas was Switzerland’s official entry for the Oscars and has been an international sales success, selling to more than 10 territories via world sales outfit The Yellow Affair.

David Constantin and Dimitri Krebs shared the best actor award for their...

"The dog has a lawyer!"...

With only a trio of films under her belt, writer-director Léonor Serraille has carved her own special niche within the overcrowded world of French arthouse cinema. Her 2017 breakthrough, Montparnasse Bienvenüe, won Cannes’ prestigious Camera d’Or while confirming the rising status of its lead actress, Laetitia Dosch. Her second effort, the moving and underrated immigrant drama Mother and Son, premiered in Cannes’ main competition, but never quite gained traction abroad.

And while Seraille’s third feature, the partially improvised, shot-on-the-fly character study, Ari, feels in many ways like a more minor effort compared to the others, it continues to showcase the director’s ability to coax strong performances out of both amateur and confirmed actors — including the film’s arresting lead, Andaric Manet.

A sort of male companion piece to Montparnasse Bienvenüe, which chronicled the roller coaster life of a young woman scraping by in the City of Lights, Ari...

Berlinale alumni in Park Chan-wook, Justine Triet and the Eat The Night tandem of Caroline Poggi and Jonathan Vinel have been selected to present their latest works in the Berlinale Shorts 2025 – To Be in This World. As we await Park Chan-wook’s next feature film (currently in production) No Other Choice, he re-teamed with Park Chan-kyong for Paranmanjang (aka Night Fishing). It’s coined as a fairy tale about death and reincarnation, transmigration and the sounds of music. From Palme d’Or winning director for Anatomy of a Fall, we find Triet re-teaming with actress Laetitia Dosch (2013’s Age of Panic) for Vilaine fille mauvais garçon (Two Ships).…...

Melisa Godet’s social drama A Place For Her (La Maison des Femmes) will headline the Paris Rendez-Vous slate ofFederation’s international sales banner Ginger & Fed.

The film is based on La Maison des Femmes de Saint-Denis, a women’s shelter outside of Paris for survivors of domestic violence and sexual abuse.

Inspired by the centre’s founder Dr Ghada Hatem, A Place For Her stars Karin Viard as a fictional doctor and her team including a midwife, a young intern and a nurse as they navigate balancing their personal lives with their professional dedication to providing care.

The cast also includes Laetitia Dosch,...

Can animals act? Sensible people would say not: Our four-legged friends can’t read a script or construct a character, and if they come across charismatically on screen, that’s simply down to obeying commands, plus the deft touch of an editor. The more whimsically accommodating among us would say those last two points are true of some human actors too; Hitchcock, with his infamous “actors are cattle” quip, suggested as much. Either way, it’s hard to watch Kodi, the ragged, hungry-eyed canine star of “Dog on Trial,” without sensing, whether by sheer good fortune or some mysterious process of empathy, a genuine performance afoot.

Called upon to jump, slump, tremble and even (sort of) sing, with an expressive range spanning untethered aggression and resigned melancholy, the biscuit-colored crossbreed hits every mark required of him by Laetitia Dosch’s endearingly eccentric directorial debut, and emerges as its most compelling element.

Alain Guiraudie’s Misericordia, a rural melodrama with a sinister twist, has won France’s Louis Delluc prize for best film of the year.

The genre-hopping crime thriller and dark comedy follows a man who returns to his native small town for a funeral when a mysterious disappearance, a threatening neighbour, and a priest with strange intentions add an unexpected twist to his stay.

Misericordia premiered in Cannes and after that became one of few French titles to complete the fall festival trifecta of Telluride, Toronto and New York film festivals. Oscar and Bafta-winning Anatomy Of A Fall notably took...

A regular on the red carpet this time last year as she participated in the 2023-2024 awards season with Anatomy of a Fall, Justine Triet has been off the circuit since the spring as she writes two new projects.

The director – who shared the Academy Award and Golden Globe for best screenplay with Arthur Harari for her Cannes Palme d’Or winning courtroom drama – took a breather from her writing this weekend to attend the Marrakech Film Festival.

Triet would not divulge details on her new features projects but did do a deep dive into her earlier career in an onstage conversation, moderated by her long-time producer Marie-Ange Luciani at Paris-based Les Films de Pierre.

‘Anatomy of a Fall’ Oscar winner Justine Triet reflects on 2023-24 awards trail and reveals she has two projects on the boil: “I am so happy to get back to work. I’m in the writing process…...

Exclusive: Chinese producer-distributor Hishow Entertainment has been on an acquisitions spree, snapping up several prestige festival titles for distribution in mainland China, including Francis Ford Coppola’s Megalopolis, which it plans to give a wide theatrical outing before the end of the year.

The film, which premiered in competition at this year’s Cannes film festival, will first screen at China’s Golden Rooster and Hundred Flowers Film Festival, taking place in Xiamen, November 13-16.

Hishow has also acquired French director Laetitia Dosch’s Dog On Trial, a highly-acclaimed debut feature that premiered in Cannes Un Certain Regard; Rooney Mara starrer La Cocina, from Mexico’s Alonso Ruizpalacios, which premiered in Berlin; and Matteo Garrone’s Io Capitano, a Venice 2023 competition title that was nominated in the Best International Feature category of this year’s Oscars.

Starting with Megalopolis, the company is planning to roll these titles out theatrically in...

The American French Film Festival unveiled the full-line up of its upcoming edition at a press conference at the Résidence de France in Beverly Hills on Wednesday, as the event returns after a one-year hiatus due to the Hollywood strikes.

The 28th edition, running October 29 to November 3 in the Director’s Guild of America Theatre Complex, will showcase 60 films and series, with 14 shorts, 14 Series and TV movies, and 32 feature films and documentaries, many of which are International, North American and U.S. premiere presentations.

As previously announced the event will be book-ended by Jacques Audiard’s Emilia Pérez as the opening film and The Count of Monte Cristo, which will close the event.

The American French Film Festival was created and is produced by the Franco-American Cultural Fund, a collaboration between the Directors Guild of America (DGA), the Motion Picture Association (MPA), France’s Society of Authors, Composers and Publishers...

The French box office dipped 7.5% in August year on year to 14.3 million admissions but the three-month summer period was up on 2023 thanks to a strong June and July, according to Cnc figures.

Pathé’s epic Alexandre Dumas adaptation The Count Of Monte-Cristo, released June 28, continued its reign in August, topping the charts for the second month in a row with 2.1 million more admissions added in August. It has helped the box office to tackle its slow start to the year garnering 7.6 million admissions in total.

If it reaches 8 million as expected, it will be the first time since 1998 three films...

The Larrieu brothers’ Cannes melodrama Jim’s Story has sold to multiple territories as it enjoys a strong opening in its first week in French cinemas for Pyramide Distribution.

Pyramide International has sold the film to Filmin in Spain, Jmh in Switzerland, K-Films in Quebec, Panda in Austria, Paradiso in Benelux, Beta Film in Bulgaria, Falcon in Indonesia, and Nachson in Israel.

After debuting as a Cannes Premiere, Jim’s Story was released on August 14 and has sold 143,016 tickets (approximately €1.1m) in its first week in theatres, a strong opening for an arthouse title particularly during an August holiday week in the country.

Lithuanian cinema, not typically that well represented on the international film festival circuit, was the big story of this year’s Locarno Film Festival awards ceremony, with two films from the Baltic nation taking a number of top prizes between them.

“Toxic,” an auspicious debut from writer-director Saulė Bliuvaitė, won not only the Golden Leopard for Best Film in the fest’s premier International Competition — from a jury chaired by Austrian auteur Jessica Hausner — but also, in an unusual double, the top prize in the separately juried First Feature Competition. Bliuvaitė’s compatriot Laurynas Bareiša, meanwhile, won Best Director in the International Competition for his sophomore feature “Drowning Dry,” while the same film’s ensemble also collectively took one of the jury’s gender-neutral acting prizes.

A hard-hitting study of alliances and rivalries between teenage girls enrolled at a modeling school in small-town Lithuania, “Toxic” stood out in the Competition...

Akiplėša (Toxic), the feature debut from Lithuanian writer and director Saulė Bliuvaitė that explores the human body and mysterious model agencies, is the winner of the Locarno Film Festival’s 2024 international competition, which was honored with the Pardo d’Oro, or Golden Leopard, in the Swiss town on Saturday. Locarno77 organizers called the movie “an incisive portrayal of teenage girls and the crushing expectations imposed upon them.”

Meanwhile, the special jury prize went to Iraq-born Austrian auteur Kurdwin Ayub for her sophomore fiction feature Mond (Moon). The film follows former martial artist Sarah who leaves Austria to train three sisters from a wealthy Jordanian family. “It’s all about sisters, no matter where they come from, and about cages, no matter where they are,” according to Ayub.

Lithuania, which has a population of about three million people but was represented by two features in this year’s Locarno international competition,...

Mexico’s Monterrey International Film Festival marks a milestone 20th edition with inaugural industry programs, a robust lineup and new team members as it seeks to further boost its international profile. The event will be held from Sept. 25 to Oct. 2 in Parque Fundidora, Monterrey, with two new programs, Wip and ProMeetings, leading its industry section.

Festival board president Lorena Villarreal spearheads the festival, which will highlight a selection of world-class films sourced from top-tier festivals, including Cannes, Berlin, Tribeca and Sundance. “The Festival is also expanding its industry footprint to establish itself as a bridge between the U.S., Iberoamerica and Mexico while supporting our local industry in Nuevo Leon with more programs and notable guests and honorees to be announced very soon,” she said, listing the likes of Andrea Arnold’s “Bird” ; Agathe Riedinger’s debut film “Wild Diamond,” which world premiered in Cannes; the Sundance-winning doc “Sugarcane” by...

When it comes to animation, you can always rely on the French. They've been innovating and experimenting with the form since the dawn of motion pictures. From magic lantern presentations at the turn of the 20th century to modern works of art like The Triplets Of Belleville and Persepolis, French...

"Don't we want to live in a world that respects the nature of each dog – his singularity?" The Jokers in France has revealed an offiical trailer for a loud and wild comedy called Dog on Trial, marking the feature directorial debut of Swiss-French actress Laetitia Dosch. This initially premiered at the 2024 Cannes Film Festival earlier this year out of competition, though it earned some good buzz and great reviews already (here's mine). Still waiting for this to get a US release date (probably in early 2025 at this point) but happy to start the buzz early anyway - especially for dog lovers. Set in Switzerland, and inspired by a true story, the film is about Avril, a young lawyer specializing in animal defense. She goes a bit overboard to try and save her client, a repeat-offender dog, from capital punishment in Switzerland, in a trial about the dog biting a woman.

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...

Switzerland’s Locarno Film Festival will debut 17 world premieres, including new works by Hong Sang-soo and Wang Bing, as part of its 2024 competition program. This year’s event runs from August 7 – 17.

The festival announced its competition lineups this morning. The Hong Sang-soo feature is titled Suyoocheon (By The Stream) and stars Kim Minhee, Kwon Haehyo, and Cho Yunhee. The Wang Bing feature is a France, Luxembourg, and Netherlands co-production titled Hard Times. Scroll down to see the full Locarno competition lineup, which also includes new titles from Ben Rivers, Mar Coll, and Christoph Hochhäusler.

The festival today also announced that French acting veterans Mélanie Laurent and Guillaume Canet will receive the event’s honorary Excellence Award Davide Campari at the opening ceremony on August 7. Previous recipients of the award include Riz Ahmed and Aaron Taylor Johnson.

Locarno’s separate Piazza Grande lineup features 18 titles, including Mohammad Rasoulof’s The Seed of the Sacred Fig,...

Chiara Malta and Sébastien Laudenbach’s “Chicken for Linda!” takes us on a lively and moving journey. The 2023 animated film tells the story of eight-year-old Linda, who longs for her late father’s chicken pepper dish after a misunderstanding with her mother Paulette leaves the girl feeling wronged. What ensues is a delightfully quirky attempt by an overwhelmed but loving mom to fulfill her daughter’s wish, spanning stolen chickens, improbable escapes, and more.

Along the way, we glimpse deeper truths about coping with loss and rebuilding relationships. Linda grapples with her lingering grief through a cherished memory of meals past. Paulette struggles to balance her responsibilities while honoring her daughter’s feelings. Their bond strengthens through comedy and compassion. Musical numbers uplift the story with joy, pathos, and truths about parenting woven into the notes.

Visually, thick brushstrokes and splashes of vibrant color bring the characters to life. Scenes feel plucked from a storybook,...

Chinese director Guan Hu’s visually stunning new feature, Black Dog, starts off with a familiar premise: After spending a decade behind bars, an ex-con named Lang (Eddie Peng) returns to his tiny native city in Northwest China on the outskirts of the Gobi Desert. He tries to integrate into regular life, but certain demons from his past come back to haunt him.

If this sounds like any number of throwaway B-movies, or like the plot of the recent Sylvester Stallone series Tulsa King, be advised that Black Dog is not that kind of thing at all. First off, it’s unclear who, exactly, the title is referring to. Is it the film’s total outcast of a protagonist, who barely utters a full sentence to anyone — including his own father — as he attempts to settle into a place that doesn’t want him? Or is it the stray black greyhound he meets in town,...

Exactly ten years after the genre-mixing, canine-driven Hungarian thriller “White God” landed the Prix Un Certain Regard at the Cannes Film Festival, this year’s ceremony culminated in the same prize going to a somewhat corresponding title: Chinese director Guan Hu’s “Black Dog,” a fusion of western, film noir and offbeat comedy with a highly lovable mutt at its center. The film, about a damaged loner returning to his desert hometown after a spell in prison and finding a kindred spirit in an equally world-weary greyhound, beat 17 other titles to take the top prize in the festival’s second-most prestigious competitive section. (The festival’s Official Competition awards will be handed out tomorrow night.)

Jury president Xavier Dolan, the actor-auteur behind such films as “Mommy” and “Laurence Anyways,” commended Guan’s film for “its breathtaking poetry, its imagination, its precision [and] its masterful direction.” He echoed the enthusiasm of Variety critic Jessica Kiang,...

Kodi, the canine defendant in Laetitia Dosch’s Dog on Trial, was named top dog at the Cannes Film Festival, snatching the Palm Dog prize for the best canine performance.

In a rare treat, Kodi, a 9-year-old Griffon, attended the event, a boozy and chaotic affair, as is the Palm Dog tradition, at the Plage du Festival in Cannes on Friday. He even gave a demonstration of his howling performance from the film, something the director said he had to be trained to do, not being a natural howler in real life.

In Dog on Trial, Kodi plays Cosmos, the four-legged companion of a visually impaired man (François Damiens) who, after a biting incident, finds himself at the center of an absurd trial to decide whether he will be put down. Avril (Laetitia Dosch), a lawyer accustomed to lost causes, decides to represent Cosmos.

Dosch said she insisted on having...

IndieWire has published its Cannes 2024 Cinematography Survey. We analyzed the data to explore (again and again) that the nine-year-old camera, Arri Alexa Mini, is the most popular camera among Cannes filmmakers. Furthermore, interestingly, in its first appearance on the Cannes Cinematography Chart and jumped straight to second place, is the Arri 35.

The main cameras of Cannes 2024 are the Arri Alexa Mini and the 35. Cannes 2024 cinematography

The 77th annual Cannes Film Festival is taking place from 14 to 25 May 2024. IndieWire has reached out to the filmmakers behind 59 films screened in various categories in the festival. The DPs elaborated on the tools they utilized to tell their stories. Read the entire survey here.

Official poster of the 77th Cannes Film Festival featuring a still image from the movie Rhapsody in August by Akira Kurosawa (1991)

As the tradition calls, we took the data and filtered it to the cameras used, to explore tendency. Based on the info,...

French film finance, production and distribution group Logical Pictures is out in force in Cannes this year with connections to 11 films, including Competition titles Emilia Perez, Limonov and Parthenope.

The company helped bankroll the Palme d’Or contenders through its three-year co-production and co-financing deal with French major Pathé, which was announced in early 2023 and involves its Logical Content Ventures fund.

Matthieu Delaporte and Alexandre De La Patellière’s The Count of Monte Cristo, which world premieres Out of Competition later this week, was also partly financed under the deal.

Logical Pictures President Frédéric Fiore and COO Yannick Bossenmeyer co-founded Logical Pictures in 2016 with a focus on film finance as well as digital innovation around blockchain and rights management.

Early investments included Coralie Fargeat’s first feature Revenge, Ninja Thyberg’s Pleasure as well as Julien Maury and Alexandre Bustillo’s The Deep House.

Less than a decade later, the...

It’s not just a four-legged friend who goes on trial and faces the death penalty in the first feature by actress Laetitia Dosch who also co-wrote the screenplay. She uses the true story to make wider observations about the often fraught relationships between humans and animals.

She based the narrative around several actual cases in which dog owners were put trial for the alleged misdemeanours of their pets including one that was appealed as far as the Court of Human Rights.

Dosch has a serious philosophical mission as the law around animals has begun to evolve with such countries as the UK and France now recognising animal “sentience” .That means they can feel pain and experience fear and other emotions so should not be regarded simply as “things”.

In the film she appears as a run-of-the-mill defence counsel who takes on a seemingly hopeless case of the canine called Cosmos (played.

Films about the ecological stakes of contemporary life often center the results of unfettered human consumption. By showing the abuses suffered by the environment, they function as both an urgent warning and a desperate plea. Claude Barras takes a different route in Savages (Sauvages), his incisive and edifying animated feature about an 11-year-old girl trying to protect her land and people from encroaching deforestation.

Premiering at Cannes, Savages focuses on elemental beauty and the dignity of community-driven preservation. It is the latest film from the Swiss director whose last film My Life as a Zucchini premiered at Cannes in 2016 and went on to critical acclaim and an Oscar nomination. As in that movie, Barras does not condescend to or patronize his youngest audience members. Savages, written by Barras and Catherine Paillé in collaboration with Morgan Navarro and Nancy Huston, is uncompromising in its messaging, deceptively spare in its instruction and absolutely gorgeous to look at.

The Swiss/French “Dog on Trial” is set to disrupt, move and entertain the Croisette from what is revealed in a first clip from sales outfit MK2 Films, exclusively shared with Variety.

The film world premieres at Cannes Un Certain Regard May 19.

Writer/actor-turned-director Laetitia Dosch, who delivered what Variety reviewer Peter Debruge called a ‘blazing-wildfire performance’ in the 2017 Camera d’or winner “Jeune Femme”, is herself taking a chance this year on the coveted award. Meanwhile Cosmos the Dog (aka Kodi in the film) will battle for the leather dog collar Palme Dog win.

As the main protagonist Alice, Dosch wears an attorney’s gown to defend the four-legged Cosmos, accused of multiple bite attacks. Known for taking up lost causes, she will rise to the challenge, confront the legal system and advocate both for animal rights and women’s rights.

Next to Dosch and the dog Kodi, the...

The world premiere of Agathe Riedinger’s Wild Diamond in Cannes Competition is the only one by a first-time filmmaker and heralds Riedinger as part of a new wave of French female directors to arrive en force on the Croisette.

The film explores western society’s obsession with beauty and fame and the omnipresence of social media through the story of a 19 year-old girl who sets out to earn a spot on a reality TV show.

Also in Competitoin is France-born Coralie Fargeat’s second feature The Substance. The body horror is produced by the UK’s Working Title Films and stars Demi Moore,...

Once a celebration of arthouse raunch, the film festival has had to change in the #MeToo era. Is that why, on screen and off, pooches are everywhere this year? Our writer goes walkies on the Côte d’Azur

One of the most eagerly anticipated talents about to grace the red carpet at Cannes this week is tall, blond, leggy and has a seductively husky voice. Par for the course, you might think, at the glitzy, notoriously libidinous film festival on the sun-kissed Côte d’Azur – were it not for that lolling tongue and the fact that the bag in the hands of the entourage is more likely to be a doggy-doo than a Birkin or Chanel.

Fawn-maned griffon cross Kodi is the star of French-Swiss actor Laetitia Dosch’s directorial debut Dog on Trial, a film that feels precision-engineered for Cannes’ 77th edition in more ways than one. Dosch tells...

Updated On April 22, 2024: With the addition of two new films to this year’s competition section, both directed by men, this year’s competition slate now includes 21 films, only four of which are directed by women. That tallies to just 19 percent of this year’s competition titles being helmed by women.

Our original story from April 11, 2024 follows.

Hot off last year’s record-breaking competition lineup — including seven films directed by women, plus an eventual Palme d’Or win for Justine Triet (only the third woman to win the festival’s top prize) — this year’s Cannes Film Festival has returned to old habits. The 77th edition will include (as of today’s announcement) just four films directed by women in the competition section, bringing representation down to 2021 levels (and returning the festival’s female-directed entries to a number that was only hit in 2011).

Among the competition titles announced today:...

France’s mk2 Films will kick off sales in Cannes for Caroline Poggi and Jonathan Vinel’s apocalyptic teen adventure Eat The Night, set to world premiere in Directors’ Fortnight.

The second feature from the directing duo following 2019 debut Jessica Forever is set in the French city of Le Havre and follows a small-time dealer and his teenage sister who share an obsession with an online video game. When one sibling’s reckless choices provoke the wrath of a dangerous rival gang, their virtual life and reality collide.

It is produced by Thomas Verhaeghe and Mathieu Verhaeghe of France’s Atelier de Production,...

Actresses Ariane Labed and Laetitia Dosch, Halfdan Ullman Tondel, Mo Harawe, Louise Courvoisier and Julien Colonna are part of the half dozen selected filmmakers that have been selected for the 2024 edition of the Un Certain Regard section. Fifteen selections were made this morning with some alluring new works from the likes of Konstantin Bojanov, Rungano Nyoni and Italian (US-based) filmmaker Roberto Minervini added to the mix. Since the 2021 edition the Cannes Premiere section have grabbed a number of premiere screening slots out of the Debussy theatre meaning the Un Certain Regard section hovers firmly around the twenty film range – so we can expect at least five more titles to be added to the section.…...

As expected, the Cannes Film Festival line-up is pretty spectacular with new films from Yorgos Lanthimos, Andrea Arnold and David Cronenberg heading to the fest.

As the days are getting longer and there’s a tiny bit more sunshine in between the showers of rain, that can only mean one thing. The Cannes Film Festival is almost upon us.

Of course, us peasants rarely get to go, but it is fun to read the reactions from the glitzy world premieres as the stars gather in the picturesque town of Cannes.

And this year’s festival line-up is a doozy. We already knew George Miller was heading to the Croisette with Furiosa, Francis Ford Coppola is bringing Megalopolis and Kevin Costner will be premiering his new film, too, but there’s a whole heap of great filmmakers heading out to the beach with their films.

The highlights include Yorgos Lanthimos’ Kinds Of Kindness,...

Descubre las películas que estarán en Cannes 2024: una lista completa de todas las secciones.

Esta mañana, Thierry Frémaux ha anunciado la programación oficial de la 77ª edición del Festival de Cannes. La pasada edición del festival fue testigo de los estrenos mundiales de las aclamadas películas “Anatomía de una Caída”, “Killers of the Flower Moon” y “The Zone of Interest”. Unas películas que posteriormente fueron nominadas al Oscar a la mejor película, de modo que este año el listón está muy alto.

Desde su primera edición en 1946, el Festival de Cannes se ha consolidado como uno de los acontecimientos cinematográficos más importantes de la industria del cine y la edición de este año ofrece una gran variedad de películas de todo el mundo; desde directores consagrados hasta nuevas voces de la industria. Aunque, por desgracia, España no tendrá representación en el festival este año.

La presidenta del jurado de...

Cannes Film Festival is continuing its push to marry auteur cinema with films with commercial potential with its 2024 selection, announced by general delegate Thierry Fremaux during the event’s annual press conference in Paris today (April 11).

After last year’s Palme d’Or-winner Anatomy Of A Fall went on to win at the Oscars, Baftas and Cesar awards as well as earning upwards of $35m at the global box office to date, all eyes are on this year’s 77th event to find the next arthouse titles with breakout potential for critics and audiences.

Iris Knobloch, the festival’s president...

The Official Selection for the 77th Cannes Film Festival was revealed Thursday, with 19 movies in Competition (see full lists below).

Familiar names who will launch new works in the Competition include Ali Abbasi, who brings The Apprentice, a feature pic about the early life of Donald Trump. Andrea Arnold returns with Bird, starring Barry Keoghan, and Jacques Audiard’s latest, Emilia Perez, a musical with Selena Gomez will also debut in competition.

Elsewhere, American filmmaker Sean Baker brings Anora to the Croisette. Poor Things filmmaker Yorgos Lanthimos will launch Kinds of Kindness, his latest collab with Emma Stone. David Cronenberg returns with The Shrouds, and Paul Schrader will debut Oh Canada starring Jacob Elordi, Uma Thurman and Richard Gere.

Related: ‘The Apprentice’: First Look At Sebastian Stan As Donald Trump & Jeremy Strong As Roy Cohn In Cannes Competition Film

There’s a strong English-language and American presence in the...

Ahead of a festival kicking off in just about a month, Iris Knobloch, President of the Festival de Cannes, and Thierry Frémaux, General Delegate, have unveiled the selection of the 77th edition of the Cannes Film Festival.

Led by the previously announced major highlight, Francis Ford Coppola’s Megalopolis, the competition lineup features the latest films from Jia Zhangke, David Cronenberg, Paul Schrader, Andrea Arnold, Sean Baker, Miguel Gomes, Yorgos Lanthimos, Jacques Audiard, Ali Abbasi, Payal Kapadia, and more.

Other sections include the previously new films from George Miller and Kevin Costner, alongside Leos Carax’s personal short C’est Pas Moi, Guy Maddin, Evan Johnson, and Galen Johnson’s Rumors, Alain Guiraudie’s Miséricorde, and more.

Check out the lineup below.

Competition

All We Imagine As Light – Payal Kapadia

L’amour Ouf – Gilles Lellouche

Anora – Sean Baker

The Apprentice – Ali Abbasi

Bird – Andrea Arnold

Caught by the Tides – Jia Zhang-ke...

In what looks to be another robust year in the making, the 77th edition of the Cannes Film Festival will bring together several iconic filmmakers, including Francis Ford Coppola with “Megalopolis” starring Adam Driver, George Miller with “Furiosa” starring Anya Taylor-Joy, as well as George Lucas who will be feted with an honorary Palme d’Or. Kevin Costner will also be on hand with the first installment of his Western epic “Horizon, an American Saga.”

Some of the high-profile films in the pipeline for this year’s competition include Yorgos Lanthimos’ “Kinds of Kindness,” a stylized three-part story set in the present that reunites the “Poor Things” helmer with Emma Stone and Willem Dafoe; Paul Schrader’s “Oh, Canada” with Richard Gere, based on a novel by the late Russell Banks (“Affliction”); Jacques Audiard’s musical melodrama “Emilia Perez” starring Zoe Saldana and Selena Gomez; Paolo Sorrentino’s “Parthenope” with...

GKids is definitely back: After winning its first Oscar for Hayao Miyazaki’s “The Boy and the Heron,” the prestigious indie distributor has another animated contender this season with “Chicken for Linda.” The delightful hand-painted French-Italian musical comedy took the 2023 Annecy Cristal Award and the Animation Is Film Grand Jury Prize.

Directed by the married duo Chiara Malta (the live-action “Simple Women”) and Sébastien Laudenbach (the animated “The Girl Without Hands”), the film is about memory and mother-daughter bonding. After Paulette (voiced by Clotilde Hesme) wrongly punishes 8-year-old Linda (Melinée Leclerc), she tries to make it up to her by cooking her late husband’s signature dish: chicken and peppers. It’s the only memory Linda has of her father, who returns as narrator to help fill the void through magical realism. What ensues is a wild chase to catch a chicken during a supermarket strike.

The project grew out...

Animation has the power to make even the simplest emotions feel as infinite and expressive as our most sacred memories, which — despite the edifying nuance and eye-popping flair of recent films such as “Encanto” and “Across the Spider-Verse” — can make it frustrating that American studios have largely been trending toward overcomplicated plots and realistic design. Sébastien Laudenbach and Chiara Malta’s extremely French “Chicken for Linda” is the clearest possible reminder of what we’ve been missing. It’s about an eight-year-old girl named Linda who wants to eat chicken for dinner. Delightful mayhem ensues.

As in Laudenbach’s “The Girl Without Hands,” all of the characters are traced with thick black lines that lend them the aspirational possibility of a fashion sketch; each of them is filled in with a single swash of color that spills over the charcoal borders of their body whenever they get excited. Linda (voiced by Melinée Leclerc) is yellow,...

"You're chickening out, aren't you?" GKids has revealed the full US trailer for a French animated film titled Chicken for Linda!, set for a US release in theaters in April. This hand-painted animation first premiered in the Acid sidebar at the 2023 Cannes Film Festival last year, with stops at the Annecy, Thessaloniki, and Torino Film Festivals last year as well. A loving mom, Paulette, who feels guilty after unfairly punishing her daughter Linda and would do anything to make it up to her. She sets off to make a "chicken with peppers", even though she doesn't know how to cook. The two talented directors on this film "unleash a unique visual marvel of hand-painted animation with bright, color-blocked characters, and a story that is an intoxicating blend of slapstick comedy, musical, and family drama, as Paulette and Nina ultimately confront the grief of an unspoken tragedy, and the meal that...

Justine Triet became the second female filmmaker in the Cesar Award’s 49-year history to win the best director trophy for “Anatomy of a Fall,” which also won best film, original screenplay, actress for Sandra Huller, supporting actor for Swann Arlaud and editing at the French film industry’s big night. Thomas Cailley’s supernatural drama “The Animal Kingdom” also dominated the race, picking up a raft of prizes, including cinematography, costumes, visual effects and music. The ceremony unfolded at the Olympia Theater in Paris on Friday evening and aired lived on Canal+.

Triet’s movie, which is vying for five Oscars, stars Hüller as a novelist who is put on trial following the mysterious death of her husband at their remote chalet. The movie is produced by Marie-Ange Luciani at Les Films de Pierre and David Thion at Les Films Pelleas.

Triet dedicated her best film award to all women,...

Both features will form part of Paris-based mk2 films’ line-up at Unifrance’s Rendez-Vous in Paris event this week.

mk2 films, the sales outfit behind Anatomy Of A Fall and How To Have Sex, has acquired Jonathan Millet’s thriller Ghost Trail and Laetitia Dosch’s high-concept comedy Who Let the Dog Bite? ahead of the Rendez-Vous with French Cinema that opens tomorrow in Paris.

Inspired by real-life events, Ghost Trail is about a Syrian man pursuing some of the people who perpetrated horrors in the name of the regime during the civil war. His mission takes him to France...

First slate to include Rachel’s Game, Oldies But Goodies, Survive.

Powerhouse Paris-based media group Federation Studios has joined forces with veteran sales executive Sabine Chemaly to launch international film sales company Ginger & Fed.

The new venture, a partnership between Federation and Chemaly’s Ginger Films, will take on acquisitions and international sales for both in-house and third party films.

The feature-focused foray is an extension of Federation’s existing distribution of fiction, documentary and children’s programming and presence in production via global companies like Bonne Pioche, Cheyenne and Monkey Pack (Robin & Co) in France, Vertigo in the UK,...