CANNES, France (AP) — The Cannes purple carpet springs to life once more Tuesday because the 76th Cannes Film Festival will get underway with the premiere of the Louis XV interval drama “Jeanne du Barry,” with Johnny Depp.
This yr’s pageant guarantees a Cote d’Azur buffet of spectacle, scandal and cinema set to be served over the following 12 days. It’s unspooling towards the backdrop of labor unrest. Protests which have roiled France in current months over modifications to its pension system are deliberate to run throughout the pageant, albeit at a distance from the pageant’s important hub.
Meanwhile, an ongoing strike by screenwriters in Hollywood might have unpredictable results on the French Riviera pageant.
But with a pageant lined with some much-anticipated big-budget movies, together with James Mangold’s “Indiana Jones and the Dial of the Destiny” and Martin Scorsese’s “Killers of the Flower Moon,” the social gathering is bound to go on, regardless. Stars set to hit Cannes’ purple carpet within the subsequent week and a half embrace Natalie Portman, Leonardo DiCaprio, Cate Blanchett, Sean Penn, Alicia Vikander, the Weeknd and Scarlett Johansson.
The festivities Tuesday will embrace a gap ceremony the place Michael Douglas is to obtain an honorary Palme d’Or. (Later, one may even be dished out to “Indiana Jones” star Harrison Ford). The jury that may determine the pageant’s high prize, the Palme d’Or, may even be launched.
This yr, the jury is led by Swedish filmmaker Ruben Östlund, a two-time Palme winner who final yr gained for the social satire “The Triangle of Sadness.” The remainder of the jury contains Brie Larson, Paul Dano, French director Julia Ducournau, Argentine filmmaker Damián Szifron, Afghan director Atiq Rahimi, French actor Denis Ménochet, Moroccan filmmaker Maryam Tourzani and a Zambian-Welsh director Rungano Nyoni.
The opening night time choice has attracted some controversy. “Jeanne du Barry,” directed by and co-starring the French actor-director Maïwenn, co-stars Depp as Louis XV. It’s Depp’s first new movie since his trial final yr with Amber Heard, his ex-wife. After each Depp and Heard accused one another of bodily and verbal abuse, a civil jury awarded Depp $10 million in damages and $2 million to Heard.
In remarks to the press Monday, Cannes director Thierry Fremaux defended the selection, saying Depp is extraordinary within the movie and he paid no consideration to the trial.
“To tell you the truth, in my life, I only have one rule, it’s the freedom of thinking, the freedom of speech and the freedom to act within a legal framework,” mentioned Fremaux. “If Johnny Depp had been banned from acting in a film, or the film was banned we wouldn’t be here talking about it.”
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