Cannes Proje(c)t 2014

If the Oscars are the Super Bowl, Cannes announcements are Christmas Morning, if Santa Claus was a sadist and would only let you hear about the presents that you will receive throughout the year. And also, some of those presents are going to suck. But in general, the Cannes film festival is the best thing ever. It celebrates the best in film and most of my favorite directors choose the Croisette to showcase their latest films.

Any film festival is more entertaining the more you know about the directors showing their work. You can get excited for a specific film, you can laugh if the reviews are bad for some other. So, every year (this is the third) my boyfriend and I do the Cannes Proje(c)t. The (c) is between parentheses to help with the pronunciation, by the way. The Cannes Proje(c)t consists in the following: Once the official competition lineup is announced, we choose a previous film by each one of the directors selected. We watch them before the festival begins to get an idea of the different directors in competition, to remember films we wanted to revisit and many times, in my case, to fill out shame holes in my watchlist. After watching them we rank them in a Letterboxd list because of course. So, without further ado here are the films we have chosen to see before the festival.

Olivier Assayas: Irma Vep (1996)

Bertrand Bonello: Tiresia (2003)

Nuri Bilge Ceylan: Distant (2002)

David Cronenberg: Naked Lunch (1992)

Jean Pierre and Luc Dardenne: Rosetta (1999)

Xavier Dolan: Laurence Anyways (2012) [This is the only film I had watched before this project]

Atom Egoyan: Exotica (1994)

Jean-Luc Godard: Le Mépris (1963)

Michel Hazanavicius: OSS 117: Le Caire, nid d'espions (2006)

Tommy Lee Jones: The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada (2005)

Naomi Kawase: The Mourning Forest (2007)

Mike Leigh: Topsy-Turvy (2000)

Ken Loach: Kes (1970)

Bennett Miller: Capote (2005)

Alice Rohrwacher: Corpo Celeste (2011)

Abderrahmane Sissako: Heremakono (2003)

Damián Szifrón: Tiempo de Valientes (2005)

Andrey Zvyagintsev: The Return (2003)

We are about half-way through the project and so far, this year is having a tremendous quality. Let's see if it holds up...