"The Barber" will open Cannes
Out of competition
The official program of the Cannes Film Festival has been announced. It will open at the Festival Palace on the Croisette on May 12 with a screening of Nikita Mikhalkov’s out-of-competition film “The Barber of Siberia.” The competition will feature 23 films, including “Moloch” by Alexander Sokurov.

The period of pre-Cannes spring fever and always dubious forecasts is over. The program of the world's most prestigious festival includes films by famous directors Pedro Almodóvar (All About My Mother), Jim Jarmusch (Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai), Peter Greenaway (8 1/2 Women) and David Lynch ( "Straight story"). These names alone would be enough to record the high level of the festival. In addition to them, the famous Chinese Chen Kaige, the famous Japanese Takeshi Kitano, the famous Canadian Atom Egoyan and the famous Frenchman Leo Carax will appear in Cannes. All of them have been awarded prizes at major festivals in the past, and some - like Lynch and Chen Kaige - have already been awarded the Palme d'Or.
From a geographic point of view, Cannes this year found a place for Mexican, Iranian, and Israeli cinema. Massive participation from mainland China was expected, but at the last moment two new films by another Chinese classic, Zhang Yimou, were left out of the Cannes program. Yimou wrote a letter to jury chairman David Cronenberg explaining why he withdrew his films.
It turns out, in protest against the reaction of the West, which sees in Chinese films not artistic merit, but mainly propaganda “for” or “against” the regime. Five years ago, Yimou's film "Live" took half of the jury's special prize from "Burnt by the Sun." Then the Chinese authorities did their best to prevent the films of disgraced directors from being shown abroad. And now they themselves are withdrawing their works from the competition. What is this - pressure from the authorities or conformism, a kind of hymn to which Yimou sang in more than one of his last films? Or maybe the fact is that Chinese cinema - like Russian cinema before - went out of fashion in the West and stopped receiving prizes?
Of the American films in the Cannes program, as usual, independent films predominate and there are almost no big Hollywood hits, in particular, the promised Star Wars. Outside the competition, in addition to Mikhalkov, another product of the Danish Dogma, a new work by Werner Herzog and a new French film by Otar Ioseliani will be presented. The festival will close on May 23 with a screening of Oliver Parker's "An Ideal Husband" based on Oscar Wilde.
The jury was formed exclusively “Western” and includes representatives from the USA, Canada, Australia, France, Italy and Germany. The latter will be presented this time both outside the competition (Herzog), and even partly in the competition - thanks to Sokurov, whose film was made in co-production with the Germans. “Moloch” will have to withstand serious competition, but the very appearance of this film in the competition, plus the honor of opening the festival given to Mikhalkov, indicates that Russia has not completely disappeared from the cinematic map.
ANDREY Kommersant-Plakhov

Newspaper "Kommersant" No. 70 dated April 24, 1999, p. 7

Authors:

Andrey Plakhov