Cannes 2010 Predictions (Sidebars): Dolan, Reichardt, Larrain, Kerrigan

What do Juan Antonio Bayona, Bernardo Bertolucci, Guillermo del Toro, Ken Loach, Jacques Audiard, François Ozon and Wong Kar-Wai have in common? They all got their starts at the far-end of the Croisette in the smallest of the sections called Critic’s Week. The section specializes in mostly first time, and sometimes sophomore films from new talent. There are a couple of names below that could fit that bill.

Love, Imagined (Les Amours imaginaires) – Xavier Dolan
Dolan was the big winner at last year’s Director’s Fortnight section claiming a trio of prizes, he set up shop for his sophomore project which is in post production right now. This is the story of three friends which include Francis and Marie (Monia Chokri).

Meek’s Cutoff – Kelly Reichardt 
Reichardt visited the festival before with Wendy & Lucy, I thinking we can perhaps see her return to the same section once again with a pic set in 1845, the earliest days of the Oregon Trail, where a wagon team of three families has hired the mountain man Stephen Meek to guide them over the Cascade Mountains.

Memoria – Henning Carlsen & Ricardo Del Rio
Carlsen has been to the festival on five different occasions between 59 and 75, and if this is finsihed on time we could see him return with a pic based on the adaptation of Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s short novel “Memoria de mis putas tristes” and scripted by Carlsen and Jean Claude Carriere – this looks at a journalist who decides to celebrate his 90th birthday buying the services of a young prostitute, with whom he falls in love, for the first time in his life.

Morgen – Marian Crisan
Winner of the Palme for Best Short Film, Crisan should find room for his feature length debut at this fest with the story of a man living by the Romanian-Hungarian border who likes to fish but whose catch one day is a Kurdish immigrant.

Naufragio – Pedro Aguilera
I’m a fan of Aguilera’s oddball debut film La influencia – which appeared in the Director’s Fortnight, so I’m hoping that this picture – a POV from the perspective of the immigrant worker.   

Norwegian Wood – Tran Anh Hung
Having shown three pictures at the fest, we haven’t see Anh Hung at the fest for about a decade, but with Rinko Kikuchi toplining the project based on Haruki Murakami’s famed Japanese novel, which this tells the story of a businessman reminiscing about the intense romances of his university days, set against the turbulent student riots of the late 1960s.

Our Grand Despair – Seyfi Teoman
This Turkish film was part of the L’Atelier – it tells the tale of Ender and Cetin, two men in their late thirties, have been close friends since high school. After being away for many years, Cetin returns to Ankara, moves in with Ender, and as such, the two realize their childhood dream.

Post Mortem – Pablo Larrain
Tony Manero – one of my favorite finds at the 2008 edition, will be a major reason for the festival to pull out the welcome matt for Larrain’s latest working once again thesp Alfredo Castro who plays a man who works in a morgue typing autopsy reports. In the midst of the 1973 Chilean coup, he fantasizes about his neighbor, a cabaret dancer, Nancy, who mysteriously disppears.

Prey – Antoine Blossier

I’m seeing this as a first work that could land in the Critic’s Week section – they often introduce genre stuff and was the place where I discovered blood bath film debut (A l’intérieur) from Julien Maury & Alexandre Bustillo. “Hunting season is not over yet. … Prey takes a family on the verge of explosion into a dark forest, where mysterious creatures seem to be out of control.

Le Quattro Volte – Michelangelo Frammartino
Selected for the 2007 edition of Cannes’ Atelier, I’m expecting to see this hybrid in the Director’s Fortnight section. The pic can be understood in three different ways: as a science fiction film (without special effects), as an ethnographic documentary on some parts of the Calabrian Apennine, or as an essay about the human soul.

Rebecca H. – Lodge Kerrigan
Having been to the festival before for Clean, Shaven – this project shot in France sees Gerladine Pailhas play Jefferson Airplane lead singer Grace Slick, with the story centering on Slick’s relationship with a woman who becomes fascinated by the rock star.