Cannes 2024

Frontline is one of two Ukrainian projects being pitched at Cannes Docs 2024 on May 18. It is directed by Alisa Kovalenko who, after the full-scale Russian invasion, went to fight on the Eastern front, leaving her four-year-old son behind. “I felt that I cannot make cinema [anymore], and I didn't see any sense in it. I died for myself as a director,” she tells BDE. “But while I was on the frontline, I also felt that it's important to save memories for my son because I didn't know when or if I will see him again.”

Scottish Documentary Institute Director Flore Cosquer talks to Business Doc Europe ahead of the May 18 “tartan” pitch of four new projects at Cannes Docs. “For me, the fact that we have a lot of co-production is really a testament to the dynamism of Scotland,” Conquer says of the increasing trend for Scottish directors and producers like those headed to Cannes to look for international support.

According to the right-wing French press, inner-city Paris schools full of kids from immigrant families are hot beds of deprivation, noise, chaos and violence. Not so, says revered French-based doccer Claire Simon, whose new film is set in such an institution. All the children, wherever they come from, are being taught how to become good citizens, "how to learn and how to talk with the rest of the society,” Simon tells Business Doc Europe.

“The film's reflective narrative about Angelica's love for her [former] high school teacher, a French woman in her forties named Miss S, is both captivating and highly relatable,” says producer Brynhildur Þórarinsdóttir of her Swedish Cannes Docs project. “At its core, the film delves into desire as a potent force, encapsulating the essence of yearning and the existential solitude that accompanies it.”

Cuba and Alaska are two female paramedics working on the frontline in the war against Russia. Serving in the Ukrainian army is obligatory for men, but not for women. These paramedics are therefore volunteers, determined to serve best their country. “This film is about the experience of war from a female perspective, how to be a woman during the full-scale invasion in Ukraine,” says producer Olha Beskhmelnytsina of 2Brave Productions ahead of the May 18 pitch at Cannes Docs.

In 2024 Switzerland is the Country of Honour at the Cannes Marché, and celebrated at a series of events organised with Swiss Films in collaboration with the Swiss Federal Office of Culture and the Swiss Broadcasting Corporation SRG SSR. At Cannes Docs May 19 Swiss Films will further present, together with Visions du Réel, four Docs-in-Progress to the Cannes professional audience. BDE spoke to the producers of the new works.

“I found her life interesting as a Hollywood story because she was really one of the first modern celebrities. She was probably comparable to Taylor Swift,” US director Nanette Burstein tells BDE of her documentary about the Hollywood icon. “It [Taylor’s life] is a very compelling Hollywood story. It’s a story about feminism. It is a story about agency and it is a story about philanthropy.”

Markku Heikkinen’s The Arctic Circle of Lust examines the hidden sexuality of northern Finnish family men which is hidden from their spouses, friends and the surrounding community. “In the film, the viewer gets close to very sensitive…situations in the painful moments of relationships,” says Finnish producer Hannu-Pekka Vitikainen. “The film is intimate and of high visual quality, [depicting] archaic nature and its four seasons, from the darkness of ‘kaamos’ to spring thaw, providing a stark backdrop for private moments.”

The 2024 L’Œil d’or jury comprising Nicolas Philibert, Dyana Gaye, Elise Jalladeau, Francis Legault and Mina Kavani decided to award two films ex aequo. These were Ernest Cole: Lost and Found by Raoul Peck in Special Screenings and Les Filles du Nil by Nada Riyadh and Ayman El Amir in Critics Week.

The Brazilian filmmakers immerse themselves within Yanomami culture for their Cannes film, inspired by a book of the same name written by shaman Davi Kopenawa and Bruce Albert. “Seeing, listening and dreaming” are at the heart of Yanomami culture and rituals. The Yanomami have a deep empathy with other animals. Unlike the whites, they don’t see themselves as being “at the top of creation” and they don’t “treat everything and everyone else as a resource,” co-director Gabriela Carneiro da Cunha reflects.