2013 Cannes Film Festival Predictions: Alvaro Brechner’s Mr Kaplan

#96. Alvaro Brechner’s Mr Kaplan

Gist: What will most definitely be compared to Sorrentino’s This Must Be the Place, the Uruguayan-born, Spanish filmmaker latest focuses on a man who lives an ordinary life. Nothing differentiates him from his other Jewish friends who fled Europe to South America because of WWII. Turning 70 has had a strange effect on him: he refuses to accept he is getting old. Grumpy, fed up with the new rabbi, his community and his family’s lack of interest in its own heritage, he embarks on an unusual and quixotic project: to capture a restaurant owner, who he is convinced is a runaway Nazi.

Prediction: Un Certain Regard. Brechner’s debut film Bad Day to Go Fishing premiered in the Critics’ Week section back in 2009 and had a healthy film fest showings a little bit everywhere, and Mr Kaplan having started rolling in mid-November (see set pic above of the filmmaker and lead thesp), there is an outside chance that TorinoFilmLab and Cannes L’Atelier (2011) chosen project could make it two for two for director.