Twenty- one movies produced in 2023 have been nominated for the 76th Cannes Film Festival top prize, the Palme d’Or, which will be awarded today.
Below is a synopsis of the competing 21 movies.
- Asteroid City is an American sci-fi romantic comedy set in 1955. The movie follows a bunch of students and parents who head to a fictional desert town for the annual Junior Stargazer convention and the events that ensue.
- The Zone of Interest is a German British- Polish period drama. The movie, an adaptation of a novel of the same name, tells the story of a Nazi officer who falls in love with the wife of the commander of the Auschwitz concentration camp.
- May December is an American romance drama that tells of how a couple married for twenty years after their notorious tabloid romance, buckle under pressure when a Hollywood actress meets them to do research for a film about their past.
- Monster is a 2023 Japanese drama about a family that unfolds from the eye of a mother. When her young son Minato starts to behave strangely, his mother feels that there is something wrong. Discovering that a teacher is responsible, she storms into the school demanding to know what’s going on. But as the story unfolds through the eyes of mother, teacher and child, the truth gradually emerges.
- The Old Oak is the story of a village in the Northeast of England, where the mine closed, and people feel deserted by the system. Many young ones have left and what was once a thriving, proud community struggles to keep old values alive. But there is growing anger, resentment, and a lack of hope. Houses are cheap and available. This makes it an ideal location for the Syrian refugees that have been accepted by Britain in recent years. How will the Syrians be received? And what will be the future of the last remaining pub in the village, The Old Oak?
- Firebrand is a take on the old British monarchy where Catherine Parr attempts to navigate English politics when she becomes King Henry VIII’s sixth wife.
- The American movie Black Flies tells of Ollie Cross who in preparation for his dream of medical school, hits the streets driving an ambulance alongside Rutkovsky, a grizzled veteran and one of New York’s best medics as he makes his way through his first year on the job in New York City.
- Homecoming is a French drama about Kheìdidja, in her forties, who works for a wealthy Parisian family, that offers her the opportunity to take care of their children for a summer in Corsica. It’s an opportunity for her to return with her daughters, Jessica and Farah, to the island they left fifteen years earlier in tragic circumstances.
- Perfect Days is a Japanese-German movie about Hirayama who is utterly content with his simple life as a cleaner of toilets in Tokyo. Outside of his very structured everyday routine, he enjoys his passion for music and for books. And he loves trees and takes photos of them. A series of unexpected encounters gradually reveals more of his past.
- About Dry Grasses is a Turkish film which tells of a young teacher who hopes to be appointed to Istanbul after mandatory duty at a small village. After a long time of waiting, he loses all hope of escaping from this gloomy life. However, his colleague Nuray helps him to regain a perspective.
- Fallen Leaves is a Finnish comedy-drama that film tells the story of Ansa, a supermarket shelf-stocker on a zero-hour contract, later a recyclable plastic sorter, and Holappa, a sandblaster, an alcoholic, later an ex-alcoholic, whose paths have accidentally crossed and who, despite adversity and misunderstandings, try to build some kind of relationship on the harsher side of the welfare state.
- A Brighter Tomorrow is an Italian comedy about a film director, unhappy with the movie he’s shooting about a Hungarian circus stranded in Rome during the 1956 anti-Soviet uprising, who faces divorce from his producer wife.
- Club Zero is a thriller that follows Miss Novak who joined an international boarding school to teach a conscious eating class. She instructs that eating less is healthy. The other teachers are slow to notice what is happening and by the time the distracted parents begin to realise, Club Zero has become a reality.
- Four Daughters is an Arabic documentary about a Tunisian mother of four daughters, Olfa, whose two older daughters disappear. To fill in their absence, the filmmaker, Kaouther Ben Hania, invites professional actresses and invents a unique cinema experience that will lift the veil on Olfa and her daughters’ life stories.
- Anatomy of a Fall is a French thriller. Sandra, Samuel and their visually impaired son Daniel have been living in a remote mountain location for the past year. When Samuel is found dead outside the house, an investigation for death in suspicious circumstances is launched. Amidst the uncertainty, Sandra is indicted: Was it suicide or homicide? A year later Daniel attends his mother’s trial, a veritable dissection of his parents’ relationship.
- La Chimera is a romantic movie that centres on a young British archaeologist who gets involved in an international network of stolen Etruscan artefacts during the 1980s. The film stars Josh O’Connor and Isabella Rossellini.
- Youth (Spring) is a documentary on a group of young textile workers in the Chinese town of Zhili. Liming is a worker district close to Shanghai – the richest city in China. Every year, many young people leave their villages and move there. They are between 17 and 20, all from rural Yunnan Province, 2,500 km west, where the Yangtze River has its source. These young Yunnanese often live at their place of work, in dormitories, unsanitary rooms, or sometimes in small studios. Time and space to meet are missing them. So, they communicate through QQ, MSN China. They live as adults but they are teenagers, and the unstable situation, economic pressures, and geographical dispersion, burn their innocence and youth. Wang Bing will spend a year with them in Liming: at work, at home, on the Internet, every day of their professional, romantic, and friendly relations. At the end of the year, he will follow them in the opposite direction to their province of origin, to be with their family and celebrate Chinese New Year.
- Banel & Adama movie is a French-Malian-Senegalese romantic movie. It tells of young adults Banel and Adama who live in a small remote village in northern Senegal. Adama is introverted and discreet while Banel is passionate and rebellious, they are destined to love each other with eternal love. But the couple will be put to the test by the conventions of the community because where they live, there is no place for passion and even less for chaos.
- Kidnapped is an Italian historical drama of Edgardo Mortara, a young Jewish boy living in Bologna, Italy, who in 1858, after being secretly baptized, was forcibly taken from his family to be raised as a Christian. His parents’ struggle to free their son became part of a larger political battle that pitted the papacy against forces of democracy and Italian unification.
- The Pot-au-Feu is a French historical romance. Eugenie, an esteemed cook, has been working for over the last 20 years for Dodin, a fine gourmet. Growing fonder of one another, their bond turns into a romance and gives rise to delicious dishes that impress even the world’s most illustrious chefs. When Dodin is faced with Eugenie’s reluctance to commit to him, he decides to start cooking for her.
- Last Summer is a French erotic drama about a lawyer, mother of two little girls, who welcomes into her home the 17-year-old son from her husband’s first marriage, with whom she would have an affair.
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