Fandor Fortnight at Cannes continues with more acclaimed films from around the globe, all of which played at the world’s most prestigious film festival. Watch Katharine Hepburn and Vanessa Redgrave in The Trojan Women, the hit Australian road comedy Siam Sunset (winner of the Golden Rail Award at Cannes ’99), and two absorbing stories about the lives of children in Africa, Ezra and The Little Girl Who Stole the Sun. And if this isn’t enough Cannes-caliber cinema for you, there’s more to come…
The Trojan Women
dir. Michael Cacoyannis
1971 Cannes Film Festival
“You could not possibly find a better cast.” – Roger Ebert
After their ten-year siege, the victorious Greek army seeks to curse those Trojans whom fate has yet spared. Separated from their children, denied their mourning and destined for slavery, the women of fallen Troy huddle within the parched wreckage of their once glorious city. Beautiful Cassandra (Genevieve Bujold) is betrothed against her will despite her vanishing sanity. Andromache (Vanessa Redgrave) discovers her son is to be executed to end her royal bloodline. Helen (Irene Papas) desperately wields the arrogant beauty that leveled a city as she pleads for her life. But it is Hecuba (Katharine Hepburn), widowed queen of Troy, whose enduring dignity and unfaltering strength makes cowards of Troy’s captors.
Read an exclusive article on The Trojan Women
“The humanity Mambety shows is so piercingly and immediately moving in its angelic matter-of-factnesss, its holy and surreal.” – San Francisco Chronicle
Siam Sunset
dir. John Polson
1999 Cannes Film Festival – Winner of the Golden Rail Award
Perry’s perfect life (creating colors for a British paint company) has lately become one of constant misfortune. In desperation, he travels to one of the most desolate parts of Australia where he hopes to find a special color, called Siam Sunset, which could bring him great fortune and salvation. Along the way he meets Grace, a woman who seems to belong to a different world. Together, in the midst of the Australian outback they decide to give life, and maybe love, another chance. But will the wild universe they live in let them? A quirky comedy with just a twist of fantasy.
Read an exclusive article on Siam Sunset
Ezra
dir. Newton Aduaka
2007 Cannes Film Festival – Critics Week Selection
EZRA is the first film to give an African perspective on the disturbing phenomenon of abducting child soldiers into the continent’s recent civil wars. It was awarded the Grand Prize at the 2007 Festival Panafricain du Cinema à Ouagadougou (FESPACO), Africa’s largest and most prestigious film event, and was selected for the International Critics Week at the 2007 Cannes Film Festival. EZRA stands out among other African films because it is a complex psychological study, not just of the brutalizing, healing and reintegration into society of one of thousands of traumatized former child soldiers, but also as a key for reconstructing these societies themselves.
