We are running out, tomorrow the jury headed by Swedish director Ruben Östlund will unveil the Golden Palm and other awards. In the meantime, here is the presentation of the latest titles in the competition: the film by Alice Rohrwacher The chimeraset in the world of grave robbers, and the film by Ken Loach who at 86 years old still presents his cinema of struggle and poetry with The old oakmeeting between a pub manager and a Syrian photographer.
The director of Happy Lazarus (fresh from an Oscar nomination for his short film The pupils) Alice Rohrwacher returns to the competition five years after the screenplay award and presents The chimera starring Josh O’Connor (the young Charles of The Crown). Everyone chases his chimera, without ever being able to grab it. For some it is the dream of easy money, for others the search for an ideal love… Back in a small town on the Tyrrhenian Sea, Arthur finds his unfortunate band of grave robbers, thieves of Etruscan kits and archaeological wonders. Arthur has a gift that he puts at the service of the gang: he feels emptiness. The emptiness of the earth in which the vestiges of a past world are found. The same emptiness that the memory of his lost love, Beniamina, has left in him. In an adventurous journey between the living and the dead, between woods and cities, between parties and solitudes, the intertwined destinies of these characters unfold, all in search of the chimera. They complete the cast Isabella Rossellini, Carol Duarte, Alba Rohrwacher And Vincent Nemolato.
With his twenty-seventh film, Loach tells of a special place: the Old Oak is not only the last pub left standing in an anonymous mining town, but it is the only public space where people can come together in a once thriving community that is now having a hard time after 30 years of decline. TJ Ballantyne (Dave Turner), the landlord, grips The Old Oak with his fingertips, and his grip is in even more danger when The Old Oak becomes contested territory after the arrival of Syrian refugees who are placed in the villagesor. In an unlikely friendship TJ meets a young Syrian, Yara (Ebla Mari) with her camera. Will they be able to find a way to make the two communities understand?
Guest of the last Rendez Vous Then Jane Fonda, protagonist of many pages of cinema and civil battles. Jane Fonda is a two-time Academy Award-winning actress (Best Actress in 1971 for Inspector Klute’s Call Girl and 1978 for Coming Home), producer, author and activist. She is a seven-time Golden Globe winner and received the Cecil B. DeMille Award in 2021. Her career spans over fifty films and a fervent activism for women’s rights, Native Americans and ecology. Jane Fonda received a Palme d’Or in 2007 as an honorary award. The actress presented several films at the festival that marked her work, from Three steps into delirium by Roger Vadim in 1968 a Youth by Paolo Sorrentino in 2015, passing through Doll house by Joseph Losey in 1973, or the documentary on Brando released in 2007.
