No Cannes for Tarr, Assayas, Mundruczo, Schnabel, Loach and Malick?

Cannes announced 16 films in the Main Competition today and the Un Certain Regard is perhaps complete but could fit two more titles in, but as expected, Terrence Malick’s film is still in limbo. Apart from that frustrating example, there are about three to five available slots in the Main Comp and some hefty titles that are missing in action. I’ve compiled a list below, but worth mentioning are blatant omissions such as Julian Schnabel’s Miral, Kornel Mundruczo’s Frankenstein Project, Ken Loach’s Route Irish and perhaps even Bruce Robinson’s The Rum Diary. I’m not shocked to see a Bela Tarr Cannes-less edition as the film had production problems due to bad weather. Which films from the list below do you think will be last minute additions?

Carancho — Pablo Trapero 
Scripted by Trapero, Alejandro Fadel, Martin Mauregui and Santiago Mitre, this sees Gusman play a jailed woman who gives birth in prison and struggles to bring up her son with dignity…

Carlos – Olivier Assayas
Co-written by Assayas and Dan Franck, Carlos the Jackal traces the life of Carlos (currently serving a life sentence in a French prison) from 1973-1994. Full of violence and secret-service manipulation, the story includes the 1974 bomb attack on the Publicis Drugstore in Paris, the 1975 hostage-taking of 11 OPEC ministers in Vienna and several planned assassinations..

The Frankenstein Project – Kornel Mundruczo 
Scripted by Mundruczó, this is inspired by Mary Shelley’s classic book, this is a re-interpretation of the story with the monster being replaced by a child, who returns home from a boarding school, struggling for the love of his family…

Incendies – Denis Villeneuve 
Adapted from Wajdi Mouawad’s acclaimed stageplay, Incendies sees a pair of wins Jeanne and Simon Marwan weren’t expecting much from their mother Nawal’s will. They are understandably stunned when Jean Lebel, notary and longtime friend of Nawal’s, reads her last wishes: for the twins to hand-deliver two letters, one to a father they thought dead, the other to a brother they never knew existed.

Little White Lies (Les Petits Mouchoirs) – Guillaume Canet
Written by Canet, every year a group of friends spend the month of August together at one of their holiday homes on the Cap Ferret. Max, a successful restaurant owner, and Véro, his eco-friendly wife invite a merry group of friends to their beautiful beach house to celebrate Antoine’s birthday and kick-start the vacation… 

Lope – Andrucha Waddington
Written by Jordi Gasull and Ignacio del Moral, set in 16th Century Spain. Gifted young playwright Lope de Vega (Alberto Ammann) returns to Madrid from the war filled with ambition, eager to live, to write, to make his dreams a reality… Penniless, he is forced to work as a humble copyist. Lope falls for Elena, his boss’s ravishing daughter. His well-connected boss, who runs the most successful theatre troupe in the city, would never approve of the liaison, so the affair is kept secret…

Miral – Julian Schnabel
This is based on Rula Jebreal’s book about the real-life Palestinian woman Hind Husseini, who started the Dar Al-Tifl orphanage in Jerusalem in the wake of the 1948 partition of Palestine and the creation of the state of Israel. Jerusalem, 1948…

Neds – Peter Mullan 
A.k.a Non-Educated Delinquents, this is set in the late 1970s in Glasgow…

Norwegian Wood – Tran Anh Hung
Based on Haruki Murakami’s famed Japanese novel Norwegian Wood, the melancholy tune and sentiment of this classic Beatles song seems to have taken the life of Toru Watanabe (Kenichi Matsuyama), who is similarly uncertain as to how he should view his relationships.

Potiche – François Ozon
Adapted by the director from Pierre Barillet and Jean-Pierre Grédy’s eponymous play, Potiche is set in a French bourgeois province in 1977. Suzanne (Deneuve) is the submissive wife of rich industrialist Robert Pujol (Luchini), who runs his umbrella factory with an iron hand and turns out to be just as nasty and tyrannical with his workers as he is with his mistress (Viard), children (Renier and Godrèche) and “trophy” wife…

The Rabbi’s Cat – Joann Sfar and Antoine Delesvaux
Set in Algeria in the 1930s, a rabbi’s cat who learns how to speak after swallowing the family parrot expresses his desire to convert to Judaism.

The Revenge (Hævnen) – Susanne Bier
Scripted by Biers and Anders Thomas Jensen, this takes place in Sudan’s refugee camps and in a little Danish provincial town. Two Danish families cross paths and an unusual and dangerous friendship develops…

Route Irish – Ken Loach
Scripted by Paul Laverty, this is set on the most dangerous stretch of road in Baghdad where a British mercenary soldier is killed under mysterious circumstances. The story of two men who work as private security contractors in Iraq who risk their lives in a city awash with violence and greed…

The Rum Diary – Bruce Robinson
The adaptation of Hunter S. Thompson’s classic The Rum Diaries is about love, treachery and lust amid the palm tree-lined setting of San Juan, Puerto Rico, in the 1950s. This is about a love triangle in the tale of a washed-up, hard-drinking journalist named Paul Kemp (Johnny Depp)…

The Tree Of Life – Terrence Malick
Written by Malick, this is about the evolution of a young man (Brad Pitt) in 1950s Midwest to his disillusioned adult adulthood. We trace the evolution of an eleven-year-old boy in the Midwest, Jack, one of three brothers. At first all seems marvelous to the child. He sees as his mother does, with the eyes of his soul. She represents the way of love and mercy, where the father tries to teach his son the world’s way, of putting oneself first…

The Turin Horse – Bela Tarr
Co-written by Tarr and Laszlo Krasznahorkai, the film is freely inspired by an episode that marked the end of philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche’s career. On January 3,1889, on the piazza Alberto in Turin, a weeping Nietzsche flung his arms around an exhausted and ill-treated carriage horse, then lost consciousness. After this event, the philosopher never wrote again and descended into madness and silence…