The actress and director Elena MartÃn Gimeno will compete with her second feature film, Creatura, in the Cannes Film Festival’s Fortnight, a parallel section of the contest, which will be held from May 17 to 26 and whose selection was revealed this Tuesday in Paris. Last year there was also Spanish representation in that section with Elena López Riera and her film El agua.
The film, shot in Catalan with a script signed by MartÃn herself and Clara Roquet (director of Libertad), narrates the sexual awakening of a woman. This drama set in the Costa Brava has a cast led by Elena MartÃn herself, Clà udia Dalmau and Mila Borrà s, who play the leading role, Mila, with different ages; in addition to Oriol Pla, Alex Brendemühl and Clara Segura, among other interpreters.
When presenting the selection of the Fortnight at a press conference, the general delegate of the section, Julien Rejl, highlighted the “great sensitivity” of the work in its treatment of sexual issues and inhibitions.
This parallel section of the Cannes festival, which seeks proposals from new talents and unique film scripts, will feature a total of nineteen films.
A special screening will be dedicated to paying tribute to the cinema of the Portuguese Manoel de Oliveira, and more specifically, to the thirtieth anniversary of Vale Abraão, a film that also stars in the official poster of this 2023 edition of the Fortnight.
The opening session will be in the hands of the French filmmaker Cédric Kahn, with Le procès Goldman, while the closing session will screen Woo-Ri-Ui-Ha-Ru (In our day), by the South Korean Hong Sang-soo.
Among the feature films in competition, along with MartÃn’s, the proposals by the French Michel Gondry (Le livre des solutions) stand out; Légua by the Portuguese Filipa Reis and João Miller Guerra, or Conann, by the also French Bertrand Mandico.
The Fortnight will not feature Latin American works and Rejl himself has acknowledged that “it is true that the continents and territories are present unevenly.”
This year they have wanted fewer films to compete, he added, because less quantity implies more exposure for each of the titles. The section will be completed with the projection of a dozen short films from countries such as Italy, China, the United States or Iran.
The renamed Filmmakers’ Fortnight for reasons of inclusion, formerly known as Directors’ Fortnight, is a section parallel to the Cannes Film Festival created in 1969 by the Society of Filmmakers (SRF) to discover, with an independent spirit, films by young authors and to celebrate the singular works of recognized directors.
It is a section in which filmmakers such as George Lucas, Martin Scorsese, Ken Loach and Jim Jarmusch have participated.
