The Cannes Film Festival, probably the most prestigious annual film festival in the world, opened this week at the Palais des Festivals et des Congrès in the south of France.
When I was completing my undergraduate degree in Film/Communications at Howard University, I made a silly pact with some of my fellow Comm majors (way, way back then) that I would never attend Cannes or Sundance (the important Salt Lake City festival started in the late 1970s) unless I had my own film in competition, which means that I’ve never been to either festival. Not once. And given the kinds of demands that my writerly/scholarly interests have been placing on my filmmaking productivity, I’m certainly in danger of having that silly little promise torment me for the rest of my life. Maybe I’m being too stubborn. (Surely, some of those former student-filmmakers have broken our hubristic pact.) But alas, that’s another story entirely.
I’m only bringing up the Cannes festival now because a film that I blogged about earlier this year, after it won two big prizes at Sundance this past January, is currently in competition at Cannes. Back in January, the film was called Push: Based on a Novel by Sapphire, but now it is titled, simply, Precious, the lead character’s middle name. And its trailer is finally on YouTube, which I included above.
The film is competing in a special section at Cannes, Un Certain Regard, which means that it is one of the films screened at the Salle Debussy (again, where I’ve never, ever been). The section functions as a kind of parallel track to the competition for the coveted Palme d’Or. Un Certain Regard was started at about the same time that Sundance organized its initial festival and highlights films deemed “original and different,” films considered deserving of special international attention. They started awarding prizes for that section back in 1998.
Again, since I’m in Philadelphia this week and not basking in the sun on the French Riveria, I won’t be seeing Precious anytime soon. But I do look forward to getting a chance to find out how an interesting and quirky director, Lee Daniels, has interpreted a difficult and troubling work of fiction.
