CANNES: Turkish director Nuri Bilge Ceylan is back in competition in Cannes with The Wild Pear Tree four years after winning the Palme d’Or with his Winter Sleep. The film is a coproduction between Turkey, Germany, Bulgaria, Bosnia Herzegovina, Macedonia, Sweden and Qatar although this is no pudding with Ceylan’s unmistakable style undiluted by the complexities of a seven country coproduction. 

CANNES: Russian director Kirill Serebrennikov has not arrived in Cannes with his Cannes competition film Summer because he is under house arrest in Moscow accused of embezzling state funds meant to support the theatre he directed.  But while the director’s personal story might be gloomy one Summer fills the screen with music and an innocent joy.

CANNES: Director Eva Husson has based her latest film Girls in the Sun on a real events. Yazidi women were forced to watch their men being slaughtered, then they were kidnapped, raped and sold into slavery.  Some of the Yazidi women bravely managed to escape and join the women’s brigades of Kurdish fighters to fight against ISIS and while the Yazidi are never actually mentioned in the film by name this is obviously their story. 

CANNES: Polish director Paweł Pawlikowski has pulled of a near impossible task of following his masterpiece Ida with a possibly even better film Cold War which screens in competition in Cannes.

CANNES: Director Sergey Dvortsevoy arrives in the Cannes with Ayka a grim tale that follows the life of an unemployed woman from Kyrgyzstan who spends five desperate days on the winter streets of Moscow after giving birth to a baby she cannot afford to care for at a Moscow maternity hospital.