Cannes

A Turkish soldier and an Iraqi taxi driver attempt to transport the body of a deceased Iraqi soldier to his family all the way across the country in writer/producer/director Hiner Saleem's darkly comic road movie. The first Iraqi film to ever compete in the Palme d'Or competition at the Cannes Film Festival, Kilometer Zero features a supporting performance by Turkish Elle cover girl Belçim Bilgin.

The Belgian filmmaking team of brothers Luc and Jean-Pierre Dardenne turned heads with Rosetta, an intense vérité drama that closely follows a poor young woman struggling to hold on to a job to support herself and her alcoholic mother. It’s a swift and simple tale made revelatory by the raw, empathetic way in which the directors render Rosetta’s desperation, keeping the camera nearly perched on her shoulder throughout. Many have copied the Dardennes’ style, but few have equaled it. This ferocious film won big at Cannes, earning the Palme d’Or for the filmmakers and the best actress prize for the indomitable Émilie Dequenne.

"L'albero degli zoccoli" è la storia di una cascina lombarda sul chiudersi dell’800, delle sue consuetudini e dei suoi costumi. Una cultura rurale nobile e compatta, segnata nel flusso delle stagioni da obiettivi puri ed essenziali, da sposalizi e da nascite, furberie e sacrifici, necessità prioritarie ed inavvertibili vizi, da Dio e dalla terra.

This offbeat adaptation gives the viewer a postmodern taste of Shakespeare through the eyes of a deliberately obscure auteur. The film is set some time after Chernobyl has wiped everything out, and the world is trying to set itself right again. William Shakespeare Jr. the Fifth (Peter Sellars) is faced with the task of restoring his famed ancestor's lost works. He visits a resort in Switzerland and becomes fascinated with a visiting gangster, Don Learo (Burgess Meredith) and his lovely daughter, Cordelia (Molly Ringwald), who converse in actual Shakespearean lines. That's as close to the bard as this King Lear gets. It also includes appearances by Woody Allen, Norman Mailer, and director Godard himself as Professor Pluggy, a deranged individual who seems fascinated with Xeroxing his own hand.

Director: Steve Bendelack
Mr. Bean enters a church raffle and wins a vacation trip to France as well as a camcorder. After boarding a Eurostar train and arriving in Paris, the French language proves a barrier for Bean, as he struggles to get across the city to catch a train to the south of France from the Gare de Lyon…

Based in Israel, the United States and France, Gitai has produced an extraordinary, wide-ranging, and deeply personal body of work. In around 40 films, both in documentary and fiction form, Gitai has explored the layers of history in the Middle East and beyond through such themes as homeland and exile, religion, social control and utopia.

Near the Bosporus, Eyüp and Hacer live in a modest flat with their son Ismail, in his twenties, who's doing poorly in his studies. Few words pass between them, and a past family tragedy brings sorrow daily. On a rainy night, Eyüp's boss Servet, a wealthy businessman who's entering politics, hits a pedestrian on a lonely road. He drives off and offers money to Eyüp if Eyüp will take the fall - probably a six-month sentence. Eyüp agrees, and while he's in prison, Ismail wants his mother to ask Servet for enough money to buy a car. Servet, in turn, desires Hacer. How can this play out?

After a car wreck on the winding Mulholland Drive renders a woman amnesiac, she and a perky Hollywood-hopeful search for clues and answers across Los Angeles in a twisting venture beyond dreams and reality. David Lynch wrote and directed this look at two women who find themselves walking a fine line between truth and deception in the beautiful but dangerous netherworld of Hollywood. David Lynch originally conceived Mulholland Drive as the pilot film for a television series; after the ABC television network rejected the pilot and declined to air it, the French production film StudioCanal took over the project, and Lynch reshot and re-edited the material into a theatrical feature. The resulting version of Mulholland Drive premiered at the 2001 Cannes Film Festival, where David Lynch shared Best Director honors with Joel Coen.

Lars von Trier shook up the film world when he premiered Antichrist at the 2009 Cannes Film Festival. In this graphic psychodrama, a grief-stricken man and woman - a searing Willem Dafoe and Cannes best actress winner Charlotte Gainsbourg - retreat to their cabin deep in the woods after the accidental death of their infant son, only to find terror and violence at the hands of nature and, ultimately, each other. But this most confrontational work yet from one of contemporary cinema’s most controversial artists is no mere provocation. It is a visually sublime, emotionally ravaging journey to the darkest corners of the possessed human mind; a disturbing battle of the sexes that pits rational psychology against age-old superstition; and a profoundly effective horror film.

Winner of both the Academy Award for best foreign-language film and the Cannes Film Festival’s Palme d’Or, Marcel Camus’ Black Orpheus (Orfeu negro) brings the ancient Greek myth of Orpheus and Eurydice to the twentieth-century madness of Carnival in Rio de Janeiro. With its eye-popping photography and ravishing, epochal soundtrack, Black Orpheus was an international cultural event, and it kicked off the bossa nova craze that set hi-fis across America spinning.