Cannes Staycation

For many years, with no hope of gaining admission to the Cannes Film Festival, I cultivated a practice of staging my own. By seizing on the official Cannes program, announced in mid-April, and curating past work by the same filmmakers—however renowned or obscure—I approximated the two-week feast that lucky travelers will soon consume in the south of France. At this lecture, we will thus sample previous highlights by this year’s invited moviemakers and discuss what it means for each to be showcased this year at the world’s most influential festival.

Recommended viewing: Donbass (Ukraine), Chie Hayakawa’s Plan 75 (Japan), Kleber Mendonça Filho’s Aquarius (Brazil), or either Carla Simón’s Summer 1993 or Oliver Laxe’s Fire Will Come (very different films from Spain). Nobody expects you to watch more than one, much less all five! Staycations, like actual festivals, are about curating to your own tastes.

Please note: The discussion does not include screenings of films.