Melbourne International Film Festival Adds 26 New Titles from Cannes

The Melbourne International Film Festival has teased some of the highlights of its 2015 program fresh off the hype train from Cannes. With less than six weeks to go until Australia’s oldest and largest film festival gets underway for another year, the programmers have spilled the beans on 26 titles from the Palais des Festivals et des Congrès, including new films by some of the biggest names in international cinema.

Standouts include multiple Cannes award-winners. Acclaimed Greek director Yorgos Lanthimos won the Jury Prize for his English language debut, The Lobster, an absurdist rom-com starring Colin Farrell, Rachel Weisz, Ben Whishaw and John C. Reilly about single people under threat of being turned into animals. Low-key medical drama Chronic won Best Screenplay and also earned major plaudits for leading man Tim Roth, while Taiwanese filmmaker Hou Hsiao-hsien took home Best Director for his sumptuous martial arts picture The Assassin.

Hou’s film is one of a number of exciting Asian titles in the mix, alongside Jia Zhang-ke’s Chinese migrant drama Mountains May Depart, Takashi Miike’s slapstick gangster/monster movie Yakuza Apocalypse: The Great War of the Underworld and Hirokazu Kore-eda’s low-key domestic drama Our Little Sister, as well as the latest dreamlike rumination from Thai master Apichatpong Weerasethakul entitled Cemetery of Splendour.

Other hot tickets include Love, the new film from Irreversible director Gaspar Noe featuring several explicit 3D sex scenes, as well as all three parts of Miguel Gomez’s ambitious Arabian Nights trilogy, a scathing critique of modern-day Portuguese society which, despite missing out on a prize at Cannes, took home the top honours at the Sydney Film Festival this past Sunday.

Notable Cannes titles not featured in the MIFF announcement include Jacques Audiard’s Palm d’Or winning Dheepan, Todd Haynes’ widely acclaimed Carol starring Rooney Mara and Cate Blanchett, and the hotly anticipated Macbeth adaptation led by Michael Fassbender and Marion Cotillard. The latter omission is particularly disappointing since director Justin Kurzel is Australian. The good news is that all three films already have domestic distribution deals in place, so hopefully we’ll get to see them before too long.

The 26 Cannes titles join a number of films already revealed in a sneak peak last month, including Alex Ross Perry’s psychological drama Queen of Earth, David Foster Wallace biopic The End of the Tour starring Jason Segel, and Sean Baker’s outrageous transgender comedy Tangerine ,shot entirely on an iPhone.

The Melbourne International Film Festival runs from July 30 to August 16, with the full program set to drop on July 7. For more information, visit the MIFF website.

Image: The Lobster