Cannes began rolling out the red carpet on Tuesday as stars, including Kristen Stewart and Blake Lively swept into town for the world’s top film festival whose dazzle is being tested by stiff security
Cannes began rolling out the red carpet on Tuesday as stars, including Kristen Stewart and Blake Lively swept into town for the world’s top film festival whose dazzle is being tested by stiff security measures.
On foot, horseback and motorbikes, the police patrolled the Croisette, a strip of beach lined with ultra-luxury stores and headed by the Palais des Festivals, the main venue for the cinema extravaganza which gets under way on Wednesday night.
A small army of workers carefully unrolled strips of the 60-metre red carpet that will host stars such as Julia Roberts, Jodi Foster, Sean Penn, Robert De Niro, Kirsten Dunst, Charlize Theron and George Clooney over the 12-day festival. Hundreds of festival-goers, their official badges on display, thronged the streets, elbow-to-elbow with selfie-snapping tourists.
The subcontinent is set to receive a fair share of attention in the 11-day film festival with the gala screening of Woody Allen’s Cafe Society.
India will expectedly hog much of the “regional” limelight in Cannes with two entries — one documentary and a short fiction film — in the festival’s official selection.
That apart, Anurag Kashyap’s Raman Raghav 2.0, about a 1960s Mumbai serial killer played by Nawazuddin Siddiqui, is set to premiere in Directors’ Fortnight, a prestigious parallel section in which the Mumbai director’s two-part Gangs of Wasseypur and Ugly bowed in 2012 and 2013 respectively. Pakistan, Bangladesh, Afghanistan and Nepal, too, will be showcased in the latest edition of the world’s premier film festival.
Kalimpong boy Saurav Rai, a student of Kolkata’s Satyajit Ray Film & Television Institute (SRFTI), will register his presence amid the glitz and glamour with his 28-minute Nepali-language diploma film Gudh (Nest).
Rai’s film is among 18 titles — 14 fiction and four animation — selected from 2,300 entries received from film academies across the world for the Cinefondation competition, now in its 19th year. The other Indian film in the Cannes official selection — Shirley Abraham and Amit Madheshiya’s the Cinema Travellers, a documentary on Maharashtra’s travelling tent theatres — represents a journey of a completely different kind.
The 96-minute film, made over a period of eight years with the support of the India Foundation for the Arts, the Cluster of Excellence, Heidelberg University and Goethe-Institut India, is part of the festival’s Cannes Classics section, which includes nine documentaries on cinema history. The Cinema Travellers documents the changes and challenges that the once-thriving tent cinemas face in the digital age.
