Incoming Cannes Directors’ Fortnight Delegate General Julien Rejl has unveiled his inaugural line-up for the 55th edition of the parallel sidebar, running May 17 to 26.
Judging by his first selection, Rejl, who worked as a producer, distributor and sales agent at French film company Capricci for a decade before taking up his new role, seems intent on shaking things up.
He and his selection team have delivered a line-up featuring a raft of under-the-radar titles alongside confirmed directors and a handful of buzzed-about rising newcomers. See the full selection here
Deadline talked to Rejl about the line-up and his uncompromising vision for the Cannes parallel section.
DEADLINE: Congratulations on your inaugural selection. How did you find the process of pulling it together?
JULIEN REJL: It was a fascinating marathon. We received even more films than in previous years. This shows the vivacity of contemporary cinema creation but it also makes our work even harder. We received submissions from all over the world, many of them directly from directors and producers without representation by sales companies or distributors.
There were lots of surprises and the wealth of submissions also revealed creative hotspots all over the world, which is good news for cinema.
DEADLINE: The line-up features a lot of films that were not on the radar of prediction lists. Did you deliberately seek out films that were not expected?
REJL: Yes and no. My selection committee is very diverse in its profiles. I wanted to being together a group of experts with very different ideas on cinema around the table. We allowed ourselves to go and look everywhere.
I didn’t want us to jump on what the market was proposing and films that had already been identified, whether that was in co-production markets or state funding commissions. The idea was to remain open and watch films that weren’t on everyone’s radar.
We took the films we thought were the best. I was the first one to be astonished when I realised that the majority of films in our final selection did not figure on any of the prediction lists.
DEADLINE: You previously worked in production, distribution and international sales at French film company Capricci. Over the years, you must have tried to get films into festivals. How was it to be on the other side of the process?
REJL: It held similar challenges to those I encountered as a distributor. During my time at Capricci, I always tried to find original or audacious works outside the norm. But, as a distributor, I’d come to the conclusion in recent years that it was difficult to identify places and festivals where you discover really new and singular films. I think festivals need to renew how they program.
When we started to work on the line-up, we tried to be as open as possible to all the submissions that weren’t expected, films that hadn’t been talked about before in the media, or that the film industry hadn’t necessarily heard about before, because I think that is the role of Directors’ Fortnight.
DEADLINE: French sales agents and distributors lobby hard to get their films into Official Selection and the parallel sections. Producers and directors can also pile on the pressure. How did you deal with this?
REJL: I had a lot of requests and supplications but I held strong. I tried to say ‘no’ as early as possible if it was clear a film wasn’t going to be selected, to save everyone time, as well as indicate how I was building the line-up and avoid last-minute disappointments.
I kept my independence, even if I encountered a lot of disappointment, resistance and insistence. I tried not to be distracted by this and to stay faithful to the line we were building bit by bit.
DEADLINE: You said that the submissions revealed creative hotspots all over the world and in unexpected places. Were there any territories that particularly stood out?
REJL: We saw a particular vivacity in Asia, where young filmmakers have a very powerful cinematic language. I was astonished because in recent years the Asian presence at Cannes was relatively weak. I wasn’t looking specifically for Asian cinema, but we had such a rich offering that we were spoiled for choice.
Another example, which might not seem obvious, is Latin America. There was a rich offering there too, particularly from Brazil and Argentina. We don’t have films from the region for two reasons. Firstly, the films we identified ended up elsewhere. Then secondly, I didn’t want any quotas and to then take films for the sake of having something from the region.
It was the same for Africa. North Africa is very rich. We have a Moroccan film (Déserts) in the feature selection and an Algerian film in the shorts (The House Is On Fire, Might As Well Get Warm). Sub-Sahara Africa is also on the rise both for fiction and documentary and we have the film of Rosine Mbakam (Mambar Pierrette).
What we see is that there are territories all over the world where young cineastes are emerging with a unique language.
DEADLINE: One of the surprises of the selection was the inclusion of three titles by U.S. indie directors: Sean Price Williams’s The Sweet East, Joanna Arnow’s The Feeling That The Time For Doing Something Has Passed and Weston Razooli’s Riddle Of Fire. We often hear that the independent cinema sector in the U.S. is in crisis but your line-up suggests this is not the case.
REJL: I found the submissions coming out of America’s independent cinema scene incredible. I was also surprised. I also keep hearing that American independent cinema is dying, that it is becoming rarer and rarer. Even as a spectator of American independent cinema in France, nothing has really excited me of late.
But the selection process has been an eye-opener. These films arrive from nowhere. We’d never heard of them before. We watched them and were immediately swept away. Something is going on in the United States. There were a number of other really good American films, but we couldn’t take them all.
DEADLINE: Did the selection process give you any sense of what is behind this resurgence in U.S. indie titles?
REJL: I don’t know. I believe The Sweet East was shot over a long period of time, without much money. These are films that are carried by the force of the director with relatively few resources. We can see that when a filmmaker really wants to tell a story cinematically, they find a way.
Joanna Arnow’s film is similar. It’s very minimalist but it invents something in terms of cinema, comedy and auto-fiction. There is something astonishing and audacious about these works. Even with Riddle Of Fire which is more mainstream, the director dares to make a film for children in a way that has not been done since the 1980s. There is an energy in American independent cinema that needs support.
DEADLINE: Directors’ Fortnight changed its French name to La Quinzaine des Cinéastes, from La Quinzaine des Réalisateurs, this year in a bid to make its French banner more gender inclusive. This year, seven of the 21 directors with films in the line-up are women. Can you comment on the gender gap?
REJL: When you look at the submissions, 27% of the features and 37% of the short films were directed by women. The proportion of films directed by women in the line-up is above these percentages. I’d like to see more films directed by women submitted and I encourage all women cineastes to send their films to Directors’ Fortnight.
While we took special care to pay attention to all the films by women, our final choices were simply based on which films we thought were the most accomplished, original and audacious.
DEADLINE: The big names in the line-up are Michel Gondry with The Book Of Solutions and Hong Sangsoo with In Our Day? How did you secure Gondry’s film?
REJL: It’s a very sincere and very funny film. It’s also more personal and intimate and different in tone from his previous films. It felt like the right time for him to return to Directors’ Fortnight and his distributor and producer agreed.
DEADLINE: And Hong Sangsoo?
REJL: I’d never dealt with him directly but I’ve worked on the release of many of his films in the past. We were sent the film and loved it. For me, it is one of the lightest, most moving and funniest films he’s made in recent years. Given he is an established filmmaker, we thought it made more sense to propose an event like the closing film, rather than putting him the middle of the selection, and he accepted. He is very happy to come to Directors’ Fortnight.
DEADLINE: As you said, the selection features a number of under-the-radar titles. Can you tell us a bit more about Cameroonian director Rosine Mbakam’s film Mambar Pierrette? It is hard to find information…
REJL: It follows a seamstress in Cameroon as she deals with day-to-day economic and life challenges. The film follows her at work and home and also explores male-female relations at the heart of Cameroonian society. It’s a fiction that is strongly anchored in reality.
DEADLINE: The other film that is a bit of a mystery is Ilya Povolotsky’s Grace…
REJL: It’s a road movie where a father and his daughter cross Russia from South to North in a mobile cinema van. The mother has disappeared. We come to understand she is dead. The film – in a manner reminiscent of Tarkovsky or Béla Tarr – paints a picture of this relationship between generations and a divided Russia. The film was shot at the end of 2021 before the war in Ukraine. It’s a very gentle film, about the end of adolescence and the discovery of adulthood for a young Russian woman who finds herself in today’s world.
DEADLINE: Did you have any qualms about inviting a Russian director in light of the War in Ukraine?
REJL: No. The film shows that an independent spirit is alive in Russian cinema. I consider that it would be discriminatory and racist on my part to refuse the film on the pretext that it is Russian.
DEADLINE: This leads to another question that does not only concern Directors’ Fortnight. So far, not a single Ukrainian feature film has been selected for Cannes this year. Did you receive many Ukrainian submissions?
REJL: We received Ukrainian films. But for us, the message of a film, or what a film represents from a political point of view is not a reason for it to be selected. Alongside all the films we received touching on subjects related to conflict or other socio-political problems, we didn’t find among the Ukrainian submissions, films that were as strong as the titles we ended up selecting. That’s why there are no Ukrainian films in the lineup.
DEADLINE: Other intriguing titles include French experimental filmmaker Bertrand Mandico’s She Is Connan, in which he feminizes the figure of Conan the Barbarian and revisits the character at various stages of her life. What drew you to this film?
REJL: It’s a film I’ve been following for some time. He is one of the only French cineastes who makes an artisanal-style cinema in such a powerful and imaginative manner. He’s a figure who divides. Even in France, he has his fans and his detractors. It’s a cinema which either conquers spectators or completely repels them. It’s the sort of cinema, I want to give a life to at Directors’ Fortnight. The film is very rock, queer and wild. I think we need films that provoke a debate and divide the audience.
DEADLINE: There appear to be 18 actresses in the cast playing Connan at different stages of her life. Will they all attend the premiere?
REJL: Knowing Bertrand, I am sure he will bring as many of the people who worked with him as possible. It’s a cinema which is artisanal and as a result, all the people who work on his films are very close to him. So, I wouldn’t be surprised if all these actresses decided to accompany the film.
DEADLINE: And finally. What does the future hold for Directors’ Fortnight? The section was born in 1969 as an anti-establishment strand celebrating independently-spirited directors. Times have changed and Cannes’s Un Certain Regard is increasingly championing the type of cinema that previously gravitated to Directors’ Fortnight. Does this pose a problem for the section?
REJL: This is my first year so I cannot talk for my predecessors. As a spectator, I needed Directors’ Fortnight to position itself more clearly and to signal that its identity was distinct from that of Un Certain Regard, or even Critics’ Week.
With the line-up we presented today and judging by the reactions it provoked, people are sitting up and saying, they’re presenting us with films that are not on the prediction lists and for which we cannot find information.
Why is this? It’s because we did our job properly. We tried to go where people didn’t expect us to go. When a film is already known everywhere, through the markets or articles in the press, it means the film already exists, it’s already in the market, it’s already financed and its distribution is assured.
My work as head of Directors’ Fortnight, with its legacy of 1969 and mission to support independent filmmaking, is to find those filmmakers who are alone, who are trying to create and invent and who, without Directors’ Fortnight will not have international exposure.
This is how Directors’ Fortnight expresses itself differently from all the other Cannes sections.
