Cannes 2015: Jury

It was known for some time that the Coen Brothers will preside at the 2015 Cannes Film Festival, and now the full list of members of the Jury has been announced. It consists of the following distinguished ladies and gentlemen:

• Joel and Ethan Coen
• Rossy de Palma
• Sophie Marceau
• Sienna Miller
• Rokia Traoré
• Guillermo del Toro
• Xavier Dolan
• Jake Gyllenhaal

Can you guess from their personalities which film will get the Palme d'Or?

It is a bit surprising to find Rokia Traoré among the Jury members, since she doesn't seem to have any obvious connections with cinema. Nevertheless, she is undoubtedly a very gifted music artist, so the organizers made a great choice. She was born in Mali but travelled most of her youth and is now London-based, if I'm not mistaken. Her influences are so broad that she passes for a Londoner musician in Mali and for a Malian musician in London. Her 2003 album Bowmboi is wonderful, and even features the renown Kronos Quartet.

Rossy de Palma will bring some Movida madness to the Jury. She performed in many movies by Pedro Almodovar, such as the hilarious Tie me up! Tie me down!

Hopefully Sophie Marceau will be less stressed out than in 1999 when she delivered a speech that went down in history as a masterpiece of vacuity and awkwardness.

It's fantastic that the organizers also chose the remarkably talented Canadian director Xavier Dolan. Although he's only 26, he is already very accomplished, and won the Jury Prize last year for Mommy. Actually he shared it with none other than Jean-Luc Godard for Goodbye to Language!

Given the energy and freshness of this Jury, I wouldn't be surprised if the Palme d'Or went to László Nemes for his first film Saul Fia (Son of Saul). I don't think this ever happened in the history of Cannes Film Festival.


Note also that the delightful Isabella Rossellini will be the president of the Un Certain Regard Jury. Will she favor some Green Porno?

Official Selection for Cannes 2015

The Official Selection for the 2015 Cannes Film Festival has been announced today!
Discover it on the Festival's website. There's a lot of goodies.

Some well-established directors are in competition, such as Nanni Moretti, who won the Palme d'Or in 2001 for The Son's Room (La stanza del figlio), Gus Van Sant, who won it in 2003 for Elephant, and Hou Hsiao-Hsien who has been in competition six times and won the Jury Prize in 1993 for The Puppetmaster. But there is also a lot of newcomers, and in particular the Hungarian László Nemes, who was the assistant of Bela Tarr, with his first film, Saul Fia (Son of Saul).

Woody Allen will present Irrational Man out of competition.

How to stream a movie from your iPhone to your Apple TV using AirPlay

Filmster exists as an iPhone app which allows you to find the cream of the cream among the movies on iTunes. Once you find a movie that you want to watch, you can buy or rent it, but does that mean that you will have to watch it on your iPhone? I don't think that David Lynch would approve...

Fortunately, Apple recently made it possible to transfer an iTunes Store purchase from an iPhone (or other iOS device) to a computer. Even easier: you can just re-download the purchase on the computer thanks to iCould. This makes a lot of sense.

But there is an even cooler option. If you're the lucky owner of an Apple TV (only $69), you can stream the movie from your iPhone to your TV screen. For this, you simply use AirPlay, which can be activated from the Control Center (swipe up from the bottom of your screen).

So there is no need to transfer or re-download your movie, it just plays smoothly and wirelessly on your TV!

Now you can really watch Mulholland Drive without pissing off its genius director.

2015 Cannes Film Festival: Coen brothers

The 68th edition of the Cannes Film Festival will be held from 13 to 24 May 2015. For the first time the President of the Jury will be bicephalic [only one "l"!] in the person of the Coen brothers, namely Joel (60) and Ethan (57). If we also add "Roderick Jaynes," the alias under which they edit their films, we get to the picture of a three-headed dog that will defend the imaginary world of cinema just like Cerberus was guarding the entrance of the Greek underworld (drawing by William Blake, 1824-1827).

It is quite remarkable that two individuals collaborate so well together and so persistently that they end up being known primarily as a unique composite entity. In fact, such a close collaboration seems to require also some consanguinity. The only counter-example that I can think of is the Straub-Huillet duo of filmmakers, but then they were married. The prominence of the duo apparently even transcends death, since the films directed by Jean-Marie Straub since the death of Danièle Huillet in 2006 are still part of its filmography on the French Wikipedia. (Other collaborative couples in art include the duo of photographers Bernd and Hilla Becher, or with the duo of artists Gilbert & George.) It is easier to find examples of cinematic brothers: Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne (Palme d'Or for Rosetta in 1999 and again for L'Enfant (The Child) in 2005), Paolo and Vittorio Taviani (Palme d'Or for Padre Padrone (Father and Master) in 1977 and Golden Bear for Caesar Must Die in 2012), or even the Wachowski "brothers" (The Matrix). See more brothers here.

A natural explanation for the ubiquity of cinema duos could be searched in the transdisciplinarity inherent to filmmaking. The creation of a movie involves a relatively large number of diverse activities, from screenwriting to production, from direction to editing. It's a tantalising task for a single creator to succeed in achieving a satisfactory level of involvement in all these aspects of filmmaking. So it clearly helps to be more than one for that. But then why so specifically brothers, and not simply friends of colleagues? The thing is that in order for the collaboration to work, the vision for the movie, the creative source must coincide precisely in the minds of the two directors. This is obviously very hard to achieve: we have no means to directly communicate images from mind to mind, and language cannot transmit the true essence of a cinematic vision (it can indeed be argued that cinema is a genuine art inasmuch as it is able to convey more than language). Then it makes sense that successful duos of filmmakers consists of partners that not only happen to have affinities, but moreover developed their sensitivities together, just like brothers with the same passion would.
The close relation between cinema and childhood makes it probable that children reinforce each other's fascination.

A similar argument would be to consider the idea that a good film needs to be rich, in the sense that it should constitute a synthesis of broad array of perspectives on several level: emotional, intellectual, sensual, etc. And again it is certainly simpler to achieve this breadth when one has more than one heart and spirit. It is interesting to notice that both Ethan Coen and Luc Dardenne did not study film or drama like their brothers, but rather philosophy. This might have helped their respective duos to produce films with considerable existential width.

Final scene of A Serious Man (2009)

We could however go further and wonder if there is not something deeper in the relation between brotherhood and cinema. Just remember that the first filmmakers in history were none other than the brothers Louis and Auguste Lumière!

Of course, there is nothing surprising at the end of the XIXth century for two brothers to end up working together in their father's firm. Many if not most businesses were family businesses at the time. Is there more to it? Did the fact that the first (true) motion picture, Sortie de l'usine Lumière de Lyon (1895), was created by brothers set a precedent in the subconscious history of cinema?

PS: serendipitously, this first motion picture ever was shot exactly 120 years before the publication of this post!

Toronto International Film Festival

The Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF) is North America's most popular film festival. Each year hundreds of carefully selected films from all over the world are screened in a variety of programmes. TIFF is non-competitive, which means that there is no jury. The audiences vote for their favourite movies and the movie with the highest rating receives the People's Choice Award.

The next version of Filmster will contain almost 600 films that were shown at TIFF since 2000. For concreteness, the films are taken from the two most important programmes: Gala Presentation (major movies), and Masters (art-house filmmakers). The names of the awards have been standardised, so that Best Film corresponds to the People's Choice Award, and Best Director to the First Runner Up. The Midnight Madness Award and Documentary Award are also sometimes included.

As a preview, here are the films that were selected in the Masters Programme in 2014:

• 1001 Grams by Bent Hamer
• A Pigeon Sat on a Branch Reflecting on Existence by Roy Andersson
• The Face of an Angel by Michael Winterbottom
• Foreign Body by Krzysztof Zanussi
• The Golden Era by Ann Hui
• Goodbye to Language by Jean-Luc Godard
• Hill of Freedom by Hong Sang-soo
• Leviathan by Andrey Zvyagintsev
• Murder in Pacot by Raoul Peck
• Revivre by Im Kwon-taek
• The Tale of Princess Kaguya by Isao Takahata
• Timbuktu by Abderrahmane Sissako
• Trick or Treaty? by Alanis Obomsawin
• Winter Sleep by Nuri Bilge Ceylan

Filmster 1.1: Video Preview

Version 1.1 of Filmster is waiting for review on iTunes Connect.

Here's already a video preview of it:

Facebook page for Filmster

There is now a brand new Facebook page for Filmster.
Go there, like it, share it, do what people do on FB!