Cannes hosts red carpet rally, Coppola’s comeback and a meeting with Pol Pot

Hollywood legend Francis Ford Coppola introduced his decades-in-the-making “Megalopolis” to the Cannes Movie Pageant and Cambodia’s Rithy Panh delivered one other sobering chronicle of the Khmer Rouge genocide on a day that noticed dozens of girls be part of France’s #MeToo icon Judith Godrèche on the pink carpet to denounce sexual violence and impunity.

After two days of rain showers and soggy screenings, the sunshine lastly returned to the French Riviera on Thursday morning – simply in time for a red-carpet tribute to the ladies who’ve positioned this 12 months’s pageant firmly under the sign of #MeToo.

The tribute naturally featured Judith Godrèche, the French actor and director on the coronary heart of France’s belated reckoning with rampant intercourse abuse within the movie business.

She was joined on the pink carpet by dozens of girls who took half in her quick movie “Moi Aussi” (“Me Too” in French), a choral work geared toward encouraging victims of abuse to talk out about their private trauma. Collectively, they posed for a bunch photograph on the steps main as much as the Palais des Festivals, with palms overlaying their mouths.

Clare, one of many girls accompanying Godrèche, spoke of drawing power and solace from the expertise.

“We’re united as a result of we’ve all been victims of abuse,” she mentioned. “We’re now not hiding. We’re just like the movie stars. We stroll the pink carpet now.”

2024 Cannes chronicles

2024 Cannes chronicles © France 24

Godrèche praised the Cannes Film Festival for welcoming her and her solid on the pink carpet, saying she hoped the movie would assist progress dialog on the matter.

“That the pageant authorised, allowed us this photograph and this second all collectively, it’s lovely,” she instructed reporters. “The patriarchy nonetheless silences individuals and dominates the best way tales of abuse are instructed. We have to rebalance that energy.”

Thursday’s group photograph added yet one more highly effective picture to a 77th Cannes version that has to this point championed feminine icons of movie and showcased films targeted on tales about girls.

Learn extraCannes spotlights Judith Godrèche, icon of France’s #MeToo moment

Whilst Godrèche led the red-carpet rally, underslept festivalgoers stumbled out of Cannes’ many early-morning screenings, an opportunity to atone for the among the films that made headlines the night time earlier than.

Some opted for George Miller’s furiously paced “Furiosa”, the newest instalment of his “Mad Max” franchise. Others selected Magnus von Horn’s “The Woman with the Needle”, a grim however beguiling story of girls dwelling on the margins in post-World Struggle I Denmark, which earned rave evaluations from English-speaking critics and a cooler reception from the French.

Others, nonetheless, went for a screening of Rithy Panh’s “Rendez-vous avec Pol Pot” (“Assembly with Pol Pot”), the Cambodian director’s newest, harrowing exploration of the massacres perpetrated by the Khmer Rouge in his house nation.

Panh, who gained the Un Sure Regard prize in 2013 for “The Lacking Picture”, has spent a lifetime piecing collectively fragments of the tragedy that befell Cambodia between 1975 and 1979, when Pol Pot’s regime reigned over the previous French colony in complete isolation. In an interview on a terrace of the sprawling Palais des Festivals in Cannes, he harassed the significance of passing on the reminiscence of a genocide that went unstated for years.

“While you see the horror and survive, it’s important to move on the message,” mentioned the veteran director, who was 13 when the Khmer Rouge drove his household from Phnom Penh.

Assembly ‘Brother Quantity One’

His newest work relies on American journalist Elizabeth Becker’s guide “When the Struggle Was Over: Cambodia and the Khmer Rouge Revolution”. It follows a trio of French journalists and intellectuals as they participate in a rigidly scripted press journey within the renamed Democratic Kampuchea within the hope of securing an interview with Pol Pot.

Beneath shut guard, the trio are paraded previous Potemkin villages and rural “cooperatives” supposedly showcasing the deserves of a revolution that drove greater than two million city dwellers from their houses with the intention of organising a peasant utopia.

“The revolution should wipe the slate clear,” says the trio’s information, justifying a brutal experiment that claimed an estimated 1.8 million lives by mass executions, famine and illness.

The movie explores the bounds and risks of journalism below a genocidal regime bent on “erasing 2,000 years of historical past” with out leaving a hint.

“The reporters don’t have any grip on this invisible mass homicide,” mentioned French-Swiss actress Irène Jacob, whose character Lise Delbo relies on Becker. “That’s why Lise is consistently jotting down notes, terrified on the thought of lacking out on the true story.”

A still from Rithy Panh's "Meeting with Pol Pot".
A nonetheless from Rithy Panh’s “Assembly with Pol Pot”. © Copyright Dulac Distribution

Panh refrains from taking pictures the horror that’s hid from the three guests. As a substitute, he makes use of detailed dioramas populated by clay collectible figurines that stand in for the genocide’s “lacking pictures” – a tool he beforehand put to make use of within the eponymous 2013 movie.

“I consider within the energy of pictures,” he mentioned. “Rising up as I baby below the Khmer Rouge, I used to search for on the sky dreaming that somebody would parachute a digital camera.”

His movie additionally probes Western misconceptions of the Khmer Rouge, notably amongst their ideological allies who remained blissfully unaware of the mass murders that have been going down – or just refused to consider them.

Panh’s Pol Pot reads books by Jean-Jacques Rousseau, quotes Danton and listens to French revolutionary songs. He evokes the colonial roots of the tragedy perpetrated by the Khmer Rouge, whose chief ideologues attended France’s high universities.

Constructing on Panh’s previous works, the movie sheds additional gentle on the ideological workings of genocidal regimes, obsessive about routing out human flaws and society’s “enemies inside”.

“The revolution advances below the whip of the counter-revolution,” explains the trio’s information, stressing the necessity to “remove all parasites”.

“Higher no people than imperfect ones,” provides Pol Pot, often known as “Brother Quantity One”, when the movie’s titular rendez-vous lastly takes place. “Previous revolutions failed as a result of they sought to compromise with human weaknesses.”

Coppola’s pet mission

When Vietnamese troops marched into Phnom Penh in January 1979, lastly toppling Pol Pot’s bloody regime, Francis Ford Coppola was racing to complete a sprawling Vietnam Struggle epic that may go on to make movie historical past in Cannes later that 12 months.

Years late and massively over funds, the notorious manufacturing of “Apocalypse Now” was rewarded with a joint Palme d’Or after what would go down as one in all Cannes’ most mythologised premieres. The accolade meant Coppola was the primary filmmaker to win cinema’s most prestigious prize twice.

Nearly half a century later, the veteran Hollywood icon is vying for a file third Palme d’Or with a decades-in-the-making mission that has elicited comparisons together with his well-known 1979 run.

“Megalopolis” is Coppola’s first movie in 13 years. Like “Apocalypse Now”, it arrived in Cannes saddled with rumours of manufacturing turmoil and Hollywood executives anxious in regards to the ultimate consequence. It additionally price the 85-year-old director a whopping $120 million of his personal cash, financed partly by the sale of his California wine property.


Billed as an historic Roman epic transplanted to modern-day America, the film stars Adam Driver as a visionary architect in search of to rebuild a crumbling metropolis. With Aubrey Plaza, Shia LaBeouf and Dustin Hoffman additionally within the solid, it made for this pageant’s most anticipated red-carpet premiere.

Italy-based highschool instructor Cinzia and several other of her pupils have been amongst scores of people that lined up on the foot of the crimson carpet, hours forward of the premiere, to make sure they might catch a glimpse of Coppola and his star-studded solid.

“Coppola, Hoffman, Driver – it’s exhausting to beat that,” she mentioned. Her pupil Emma dismissed discuss of a flop for the two-time Palme d’Or laureate, including: “While you’ve made ‘The Godfather’ you can not produce a dud.”

Nino Rota’s iconic theme from “The Godfather” was duly performed as Coppola walked the pink carpet together with his cane forward of the movie’s premiere. It adopted Frank Sinatra’s “My Manner”, maybe a tribute to the director’s dogged insistence on finishing “Megalopolis” his personal means.  

Following the screening, Coppola was feted with a 10-minute standing ovation contained in the Grand Théâtre Lumière as he threw his hat into the cheering crowd and gave a hug to every of his solid.

 


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