My Blueberry Nights, starring Jude Law, Ed Harris, Natalie Portman and singer Norah Jones, is to open the 60th Annual Cannes International Film Festival on 16 May in France.
The film’s director, Wong Kar Wai, was the first Chinese to win a Best Director Award at Cannes in 1997. My Blueberry Nights is about young woman (Jones) who takes a soul-searching journey across America to resolve her questions about love while encountering a series of offbeat characters along the way.
Quentin Tarantino’s Death Proof, one half of the Tarantino/Robert Rodriguez “double bill’ Grindhouse will be competing for the coveted Palme d’Or prize. The recently released Grindhouse has not been performing as expected at the US box office, reportedly because audiences have not understood the concept of a “double bill’, leaving the cinema after the first film.
Other films in competition at Cannes include the Coen Brothers’ No Country for Old Men starring Josh Brolin, Tommy Lee Jones and Javier Bardem; David Fincher’s Zodiac starring Jake Gyllenhaal, James Gray’s We Own the Night starring Joaquin Phoenix and Mark Wahlberg; Gus Van Sant’s Paranoid Park, starring a host of first-timers; and Serbian director Emir Kusturica’s Promise This.
The latest film from controversial documentary filmmaker Michael Moore (Bowling for Columbine, Farenheit 9/11) will be screened out of competition – Sicko is about the US health system. Also screening out of competition is Steven Soderbergh’s Ocean’s Thirteen (George Clooney, Brad Pitt) and Michael Winterbottom’s A Mighty Heart, starring Angelina Jolie as the late Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl’s wife Mariane.
A tribute to the late Hollywood legend Henry Fonda, in the presence of his daughter Jane Fonda, will form part of the Festival programme. Henry Fonda is best known for films such as Young Mr Lincoln, The Grapes of Wrath and On Golden Pond, which won him the Best Actor Oscar in 1982.
In case you thought the Cannes Film Festival was nothing other than major hype and movie star glamour, consider that the event includes an active market, with more than
3 000 companies from 80 different countries set to participate. There will be 520 exhibitor companies and more than 1 500 screenings.
The Festival will close on 27 May.
