Movies starring Adam Driver and Andrew Garfield will compete for the coveted Palme d’Or at the 2018 Cannes Film Festival.
The selection of films for the 2018 festival was unveiled in Paris on Thursday morning (12Apr18), with highlights including Adam Driver’s latest role in Spike Lee’s BlacKkKlansman, a crime drama about an African-American detective who infiltrates a local chapter of the Ku Klux Klan, David Robert Mitchell’s comedy-drama Under the Silver Lake, which stars Andrew Garfield and Riley Keough, and Godard’s Le Livre d’Image (The Image Book).
Other competition titles include Three Faces by Jafar Panahi, Cold War by Pawel Pawlikowski, Eva Husson’s war epic Girls of the Sun, which stars Julie Delpy, Lazzaro Felice by Alice Rohrwacher, Sorry Angel by Christophe Honore, and Lee Chang-dong’s Burning, which stars The Walking Dead’s Steven Yeun, among others.
Everybody Knows, a psychological thriller starring Javier Bardem and Penelope Cruz, opens the festival on 8 May (18) and will play out of competition, alongside the likes of Solo: A Star Wars Story.
There are no Netflix titles at the festival this year, following controversy about their appearance in competition with Okja and The Meyerowitz Stories in 2017. The streaming service’s chief content officer Ted Sarandos has decided to pull out of Cannes altogether after director Thierry Fremaux introduced a new rule in March (18) which bans any films without a theatrical distribution in France from competing for the Palme d’Or.
“We want our films to be on fair ground with every other filmmaker,” Sarandos told Variety. “There’s a risk in us going in this way and having our films and filmmakers treated disrespectfully at the festival. They’ve set the tone. I don’t think it would be good for us to be there.
“I don’t think there would be any reason to go out of competition. The rule was implicitly about Netflix, and Thierry made it explicitly about Netflix when he announced the rule.”
Sarandos confirmed that he would not personally be attending the French film extravaganza this year, but some Netflix executives would be there to try and acquire some films which are currently without distribution.
