Cannes Unveils Final 2023 Selections Including Robert Rodriguez’s ‘Hypnotic’; Sean Penn Pic ‘Black Flies; By Catherine Corsini, Amat Escalante & Valérie Donzelli

Melanie Goodfellow
·4 min read
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The Cannes Film Festival on Monday announced a raft of new additions to the Official Selection of its 76th edition running May 16-27.

Two new films have been added to the Competition lineup: Jean-Stéphane Sauvaire’s Black Flies and Catherine Corsini’s Le Retour.

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Sauvaire’s thriller stars Tye Sheridan opposite Sean Penn as a rookie paramedic paired with a veteran on a drive through New York.

According to local media reports, Corsini’s mother-and-daughters drama Le Retour was to have been announced as the seventh female-directed film in Competition during the main line-up press conference on April 13.

Allegations of inappropriate behaviour on the Corsica-based set – detailed in reports by French newspapers Le Parisien and Libération – forced the festival to put its selection on hold, while it looked into the matter.

Cannes Delegate General Thierry Frémaux is reported to have said that he would not be swayed by rumors.

The Cannes Premiere section has been bolstered with Mexican director Amat Escalante’s Lost In The Night (Perdidos en la Noche); French director Valérie Donzelli’s Just The Two Of Us (L’Amour et Les Forêts) and Argentinian director Lisandro Alonso’s Eureka.

Escalante won Best Director for Heli in Cannes in 2013. His new film follows a man on a mission to track down the people responsible for his mother’s disappearance.

Just The Two Of Us is Donzelli’s sixth film and stars Virginie Efira as a woman who thinks she has found the man of her dreams (Melvil Poupaud) but slowly finds herself in the grip of a possessive and dangerous partner.

Alonso’s new film is an ambitious historical drama set across four distinct sections, which examine the indigenous peoples of the Americas and how they’ve inhabited their specific environments across the centuries. The film shot in Almería, Spain, and stars Viggo Mortensen.

There will be Out of Competition screening for Frédéric Tellier’s L’Abbé Pierre – Une Vie de Combats. The biopic stars Benjamin Lavernhe as the French Catholic priest and French Resistance member Abbé Pierre, who went on to found the charitable Emmaus movement for the poor and homeless.

Two more titles have been added to Un Certain Regard: Chinese director Wei Shujun’s Only The River Flows and French director Alex Lutz’s Une Nuit. The latter film will screen Out Of Competition as the closing film of the section.

There will be Special Screenings for French-Moroccan filmmaker Mona Achache’s Little Girl Blue, Afghan director Sahra Mani’s Bread and Roses and French-Swedish director Anna Novion’s La Théorème de Marguerite.

Little Girl Blue is a docudrama starring Marion Cotillard as director Achache’s mother.

Mani’s documentary Bread and Roses follows the experiences of three Afghan women as they deal with life under Taliban rule, after it took control of Kabul in the summer of 2021 and immediately deprived women of all basic freedoms.

The work is produced by Jennifer Lawrence and Justine Ciarrocchi produce under the banner of their company Excellent Cadaver.

La Théorème de Marguerite stars Ella Rumpf as a brilliant maths student whose certitudes are shaken when she discovers an error in her end-of-studies thesis.

The Midnight Screening lineup features Robert Rodriguez’s Hypnotic and Kim Tae-gon’s Project Silence.

Speculation about plans for Rodriguez’s sci-action thriller Hypnotic starring Ben Affleck, Alice Braga, J.D. Pardo, Hala Finley and Dayo Okeniyi has been rife so it is interesting to see the film turn up in Official Selection in Cannes.

Korean horror revolves around the unleashing of a beast following an accident on a foggy bridge.

The new titles also included the short film Filles du Feu by Portuguese filmmaker Pedro Costa.

These titles join 52 previously announced titles which include Martin Scorsese’s latest, Killers of the Flower Moon, starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Robert De Niro, and James Mangold’s Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny.

The festival opens May 16 with French actress-director Maïwenn’s costume romance Jeanne du Barry starring Johnny Depp.

The festival closes May 27 with Pixar’s Elemental, which will be accompanied by Pixar chief creative officer Pete Docter, director Peter Sohn, producer Denise Ream and members of the voice cast.

Remaining elements of the 76th edition of the festival still be announced include who will join this year’s jury president Ruben Östlund, Cannes Classics, and details of a promised tribute to iconic late director Jean-Luc Godard who died in September.

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