Tickets will be available to the public starting 1st October.

Werner Herzog, Luc and Jean-Pierre Dardenne, Ken Loach, Marco Bellocchio, Arnaud Desplechin, Xavier Dolan.

As always, the 2019 Cannes line-up depicted an authentic battle between the titans of heavy-duty global cinema, aged 30 to 82. A flowing face-off between creative forces of genius, which will replay in Bucharest, in October.

The Cannes official selection manages to masterfully fuse young emerging talents with sacred cinema monsters, European films with novel and exciting new cinema from Asia and with long-awaited or unsuspected American pieces of cinema. This feverishly anticipated mix, continiously exciting, has become, over time, its own brand identity.

Right from its very first year of existence, the festival has introduced Italian neorealism to the entire world. Since then, it has contributed not only to the discovery of several unknown cinematographies (among which the Romanian one, as well), but also to the emergence of great masters. At Cannes, glory is evoked where due, and, sometimes, pedestals are brought down. As ever, as Peter Bradshaw recently wrote for The Guardian, “the festival has lined up its masters, its silverback gorillas of the auteur league – along with its senior trouble-makers, its disrupters, its veteran bad boys”. You get to see all of them at this year’s edition of Les Films de Cannes à Bucarest, between 18th and 27th October, at Pro Cinema, Elvire Popesco Cinema, Romanian Peasant Museum Cinema, Union Cinematheque and Instituto Cervantes.

Family Romance, LLC., directed by Werner HERZOG
Special screening, Cannes 2019
Family affection as excuse for business: a man is hired to play the role of father of a missing 12-years-old girl. “Believe it or not, the freshest film to premiere thus far at Cannes is by a 76-year-old”, Mubi writes. Self-financed and shot by Herzog himself on location in Japan (“we came close to robbing a bank”, he confesses in an interview), the film has “the raw immediacy of gonzo adventure undertaken with minimal planning but maximum enthusiasm. The outcome seems to be something spontaneous and free, of sublime oddity and insight, blurring the lines between fiction and documentary. As in Jessica Hausner’s surprisingly consonant Little Joe, Herzog is here prompting questions about the nature of authentic relationships and the perhaps misplaced or fragile value of that authenticity in our modern world.”
Werner Herzog, the great and eccentric German master (with 6 Cannes attendances, Best Director Award for Fitzcarraldo, in 1982 and FIPRESCI Award for The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser, in 1975), is one of the few filmmakers facilitating dynamic encounters with the world he films, undoubtedly, with fascination and wonder alike. 

Le Jeune Ahmed, directed by Luc and Jean-Pierre DARDENNE
Best Director Award, Cannes 2019
Along with Ken Loach, the Dardenne brothers are deemed to be the masters of humanistic cinema, with heavy social implications. Perhaps it’s not a coincidence that both the brothers and the British filmmaker should be part of the select group of filmmakers who won the Palme d’Or, the supreme trophy of the festival, twice. After they obsessively attempted documentary film, they began their fictional course, starting with Falsch, in 1987. Their third film, La Promesse (1996), was screened with important critical reverberation at Quinzaine des Réalisateurs. In 1999, they make the official competition with Rosetta, film which will get them the Palme d’Or, but also the Best Actress Award for the debutant Émilie Dequenne.
The Belgian brothers built up their renown as promoters of realist cinema, however, not miserabilist, but laden with sympathy and even suspense, and also as filmmakers who push their actors to excel: Olivier Gourmet is awarded Best Actor at Cannes, in 2002, for Le Fils. In 2005, they attain their second and well-deserved Palme d’Or for the moving L’Enfant. Le silence de Lorna seizes the Best Screenplay Award in 2008, and Le gamin au vélo will earn them the Grand Jury Prize.  This year’s distinction (Best Director) turns them into some of the finest and applauded Cannes auteurs.
Le Jeune Ahmed is an extremely actual story, that of the temptation of radicalism, intensely narrated, with empathy and excellent directing skills. Set in Belgium of our time, Ahmed, a 13-years-old boy, gets caught in the purity ideals of imam and the seductions of teenage life. “A film of rare potency”, the French newspaper Le Nouvel Observateur writes, and Télérama is of the opinion that “the Dardenne brothers author a percutant portrait, infused with humanity.”

Roubaix, une lumière, directed by Arnaud DESPLECHIN
In competition, Cannes 2019
Roubaix, Christmas night. Police inspector Daoud and Louis, his colleague, investigate the death of an old lady. Two young girls, Claude and Marie, are brought in for questioning. Apathetic, alcoholics, and in love with each other. Arnaud Desplechin, one of the most effervescent and innovative minds of French cinema, has been often selected at Cannes (8 attendances, out of which 6 in competition), but never awarded. Desplechin came out as a unique indescribable force with La sentinelle, his debut film. He then shot Comment je me suis disputé… (ma vie sexuelle), which presented the world with a whole new generation of French actors. The actors in his films won important prizes, among them Catherine Deneuve, highly acclaimed at Cannes, in 2008, for Un conte de Noël.
With this new film, the director takes inspiration, for the first time, from real happenings – a sordid matter of fact from 12 years ago, whose details never stopped obsessing him. “It’s a powerful film about guilt and compassion, where Léa Seydoux and Sara Forestier deliver outstanding performances”, he declares for the daily newspaper La Croix.

Sorry We Missed You, directed by Ken LOACH
In competition, Cannes 2019
Ken Loach initially made his debut as a television director, after he was recruited in 1963 by BBC. However, the seduction of the big screen got the better of him and he became the most awarded British filmmaker at Cannes, obtaining two Palme d’Or and other 14 selections in the official competition. Thanks to this festival, he was honoured as master of social cinema, profoundly politically engaged. In his new film, screened at Cannes this year, Ricky and his parents have been struggling with debts for a few years now, in Newcastle. Temporarily unemployed, when offered a job as a courier and driver using his own car, deems it an amazing opportunity. And so he enters the wicked spiral of uberization.
“Over more than half a century of prolific socially and politically engaged filmmaking, Ken Loach has trained his clear-eyed, compassionate gaze on the everyday struggles of the British working class. At age 82, he’s doing some of his strongest work in Sorry We Missed You, a drama of such searing human empathy and quotidian heartbreak that its powerful climactic scenes actually impede your breathing.” – Hollywood Reporter

The Traitor, directed by Marco BELLOCCHIO
In competition, Cannes 2019
Here is yet another sacred cinema monster, this time belonging to Italian cinematography, present in this year’s official competition at Cannes. Bellocchio directs films since 1965 when, breaking away from the neorealist tradition, his politically engaged films would attack Italian symbols of conformism. With A Leap in the Dark (1980) he wins the two awards for acting, for Michel Piccoli and Anouk Aimée. Then he leaps from subversive films, such as Devil in the Flesh, which stirs up a scandal at Cannes in 1986, to literary adaptations after Pirandello, like The Conviction (1991). In 2002, Marco Bellocchio pesters the Vatican once again with My Mother’s Smile, selected in the official competition at Cannes.

The Traitor, which was given a standing ovation for 13 minutes straight by the audience on the Croisette, is set in the early ‘80s, when a war between the heads of Sicilian mafia and the clans involved in drug trafficking. Mafioso Tommaso Buscetta, afraid he will be killed, decides to contact judge Giovanni Falcone and to break his eternal oath he took for Cosa Nostra. The Italian journalists, present at Cannes, commended the film for Pierfrancesco Favino’s performance, one of the most talented and versatile Italian actors, and considered Bellocchio to have made “with youthful creativity, a frank and generous film.”

Matthias et Maxime, directed by Xavier DOLAN
In competition, Cannes 2019
Two childhood friends kiss for the shooting of an amateur short film. As a result of this kiss, seemingly innocent, they are forced to confront their own preferences, turning their lives upside down.
Ten years of career and eight feature films – at only 30, Xavier Dolan, l’enfant terrible of cinema, continues to stun and amaze. After receiving the Jury Prize for Mommy (2014) and the Grand Prix for Juste la fin du monde (2016), Xavier Dolan returns in the official competition with an intense and delicate drama, exploring friendship and personal identity. The Guardian writes about it as being an “unstoppably garrulous, sweet-natured new movie, a coming-of-age film, or possibly a coming-of-thirtysomethinghood film. Or perhaps it’s a portrait of a bunch of friends for whom things would never be the same again after that summer. It is not exactly a sexual awakening tale because the sexuality in question never really went to sleep. But it is a love story.”

Le Jeune AhmedSorry We Missed You and The Traitor  are distributed in Romania by Independența Film.

As always, Les Films de Cannes à Bucarest screens in premiere the Palme d’Or winning film: Parasite, directed by Bong Joon-ho.

The special guest of the festival, the French filmmaker Claude Lelouch, will commence the screening with Un homme et une femme, one of the few films that won both Palme d’Or and the Oscar

Keep up to date with the latest news regarding the 2019 edition of Les Films de Cannes à Bucarest, on the official website filmedefestival.ro  and on the official Facebook page. 

Tickets will be available to the public starting 1st October on Eventbook.ro.

Les Films de Cannes à Bucarest is presented by Orange Romania, a traditional partner of the event.
Official Car of the Festival: Renault.
With the support of: Catena, Apa Nova, Groupama Asigurări.
The tenth edition of Les Films de Cannes à Bucarest is organized by the Cinemascop Association and Voodoo Films, in partnership with Embassy of France and the French Institute in Bucharest.

Les Films de Cannes à Bucarest is a cultural project financed by the Ministry of Culture and National Identity, the National Centre of Cinematography, and and realized with the support of SACD / Société des Auteurs et Compositeurs Dramatiques. 

Partners: Air France, KLM, The Romanian Cultural Institute, Europa Cinemas, Hotel Mercure, SERVE, UPS, Eventbook.
Media partners: Radio România Cultural, Elle, Zile și Nopți, Cinemap, News.ro, Agerpres, Observator Cultural, Igloo, Banchiza Urbană.