Michel Franco Washed Ashore with Tim Roth & Charlotte Gainsbourg on “Driftwood”

We’re thinking that Michel Franco might shore up in Cannes as a producer for Lorenzo Vigas’ highly anticipated The Box, but he could possibly be attending the fest with a surprise comp title of his own. Either production got underway (most likely with his regular Cinematographer Yves Cape) at the beginning of October and was shrouded in secrecy (entirely possible since at least one sequence was filmed in a farm), or, the more likely scenario, it was in pre-production mode and got one false start, but one of our favorite Mexican auteurs would be looking towards Driftwood as his next project. Filmed (or to be filmed) in France with Tim Roth (who might be in Cannes for Mia Hansen-Love’s Bergman Island) and Charlotte Gainsbourg toplining, the Cineuropa folks threw in the title in their last Cannes prognostications. Luxbox are producing the filmmaker’s seventh feature.

Gist: There are no details on the project but we imagine it could be a French or English language film and will contain at least one flashback sequence relating to Roth’s character’s family and childhood.

Worth Noting: Roth and Franco teamed up on the empathetic palliative care worker drama with a twist portrait Chronic back in 2015. This would be their second collab and would also be Franco’s second film outside his native country.

Do We Care?: Currently riding high after winning big at the 2020 Venice Film Festival, New World like After, Lucia, and April’s Daughter before it as resonated with a select few. Our own Nicholas Bell confirms that this “isn’t likely to win over any of the director’s detractors, but there’s no denying it’s power to impressively disturb and gall its audience by hitting too close to home in its examination of the selfishness of humans and their apparent self-fulfilling prophecy of annihilation.”