2023 Cannes: Sauvaire’s Black Flies & Corsini’s Le retour in Palme Race; Escalante & Alonso in Cannes Premiere

Thierry Frémaux has circled Jean-Stéphane Sauvaire‘s Black Flies (which we thought would have been an OOC offering) and the already battle-ready nouveau item by Catherine Corsini with Le retour as the last entries (we now have twenty-one titles in all) in the running for Palme d’Or but it’s the surprising and stunning developments in the Amat Escalante and Lisandro Alonso dossiers that have us perplexed. In a flurry of thirteen late additions falling into all sections, we find Valérie Donzelli’s L’Amour et les forêts, Escalante’s (confirmed final title) Perdidos en la Noche and Lisandro Alonso’s Eureka filling up the Cannes Premiere. Unless there are more developments it appears that Bonello, Dumont and Lanthimos will now set sail for Venice premieres.

We can consider Chinese filmmaker Wei Shujun a Cannes regular now – he brings Only the River Flows closing out the Un Certain Regard comp while Alex Lutz‘s third feature Une Nuit (featuring himself alongside Karin Viard) will close the section and be spotlighted as a non-comp entry and one extra short film (and no its not JLG) by a notable auteur being added in Pedro Costa Filles du feu). In the Out of Comp sections we have L’Abbé Pierre – Une Vie de Combats (formerly titled les onze vies de l’abbé Pierre) by Frédéric Tellier with Benjamin Lavernhe and Emmanuelle Bercot toplining. There are indeed several WWII items in Cannes this year. In the Special Screenings section we have French-Moroccan filmmaker Mona Achache digging into her family tree with docu-esque item Little Girl Blue, we have Sahra Mani‘s unheard of sophomore feature Bread And Roses and Anna Novion‘s third feature film in Le Théorème de Marguerite. And finally making it a solid five, the Midnight Screenings will also include Robert Rodriguez‘s SXSW tested title Hypnotic and Kim Tae-gon‘s Project Silence which takes place when an accident occurs on a foggy bridge and, as a result, an unknown beast is unleashed.