Cannes just made their lineup a lot more
intriguing in a matter of minutes as they announced the additions of major
auteurs to their lineups this morning.
Turkish
director Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s "The Wild Pear Tree" has been added to competition. Ceylan is a
top-tier art-house filmmaker that won the Palme d’or in 2014 for "Winter Sleep," Best Director in 2008 for "Three
Monkeys," the Grand Jury prize in 2002 for "Distant," and that
same prize again for 2011's masterful "Once Upon A Time In Anatolia,"
the latter of which is still his best movie.
Also added
to competition, and upgraded from the Un Certain Regard section, was "Knife + Heart" by
French filmmaker Yann Gonzalez and starring Vanessa Paradis
and also "Ayka" by Kazakh Sergey Dvortsevoy,
director of the excellent "Tulpan" which
won Un Certain Regard Prize in 2008.
The
Competition should now be complete and will have 21 films, for those interested
in such stats, only three of those films are by women filmmakers.
If anything,
the Out of Competition titles announced today might interest a more
mainstream-oriented attendee of the fest, such as Lars Von Trier’s "The House That Jack Built" starring
Matt Dillon and Uma Thurman, Kevin Macdonald's documentary "Whitney" about the
life of singer Whitney Houston, and HBO's sci-fi adaptation of "Fahrenheit 451" by the
excellent Ramin Bahrani, part of the cast for the latter includes
Michael B. Jordan and Michael Shannon.