Producer Ani Schroeter (Bunnylovr) attended the 2025 Cannes Film Festival as The Gotham Cannes Producers Network Fellow. Below find her wrap on the festival and her experiences at the Producers Network. I feel like I’m coming down from my first week as a high school freshman. The Cannes Film Festival was daunting, invigorating and I cannot wait to go back. While at most U.S. festivals, running into film friends on the street is the norm, at Cannes, they are few and far between. At least for a newbie like me. This was my first year at Cannes, and I am […]

The post Rosé, Learning about Co-Productions and a Charli XCX DJ Set: Ani Schroeter’s Cannes Producer Network Diary first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.

The American Pavilion at the Cannes Film Festival has announced the winners of this year’s Emerging Filmmaker Showcase sponsored by Gold House. Gold House awarded the inaugural Cultural Impact award to Andy “Celeste” Diep for Happy New Year, Ms. Luna. This award was conceived to recognize a filmmaker across the showcase’s categories whose work exemplifies excellence in multicultural narratives or underrepresented perspectives.  “Happy New Year, Ms. Luna” also won the Emerging Filmmaker LGBTQ+ Award. The film’s director, Andy “Celeste” Diep is a AmPav Student Program Alumni from 2015. “It’s been wonderful to have almost all the 25 filmmakers with their […]

The post American Pavilion Emerging Filmmaker Showcase Announces 2025 Winners first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.

Since founding Metafilms over two decades ago, Montreal-based producer Sylvain Corbeil has become a prolific and respected pillar of Quebec’s independent film scene, collaborating with filmmakers whose bold and idiosyncratic visions have served to bolster the place of modern Canadian cinema on a world stage. Alongside fellow producer Nancy Grant, who co-leads Metafilms, Corbeil has championed the work of widely acclaimed French-language filmmakers like Xavier Dolan (Mommy, It’s Only the End of the World), Maxime Giroux (Felix & Meira), Denis Côté (That Kind of Summer), Monia Chokri (A Brother’s Love), and Anne Émond (Nuit #1, Our Loved Ones). A frequent […]

The post “We Do Believe the Audience is More Intelligent Than the Industry Thinks: Producer Sylvain Corbeil on the Cannes-Premiering Peak Everything first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.

In the Summers producer Daniel Tantalean is a 2025 Gotham Cannes Producer Network Fellow and is blogging about his experience at the festival here at Filmmaker. Like his first post, this second entry takes the form of a letter written home to his fiance. My Love, I’m at the halfway point of this experience. And though I’ve started most mornings by sending you a quick text, just something sweet for you to wake up to, I still miss you terribly. Being here without you by my side feels like something is always slightly out of frame. At this point, sleep […]

The post “We’re All Fighting to Tell Our Stories”: Daniel Tantalean’s Cannes Producer Diary #2 first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.

The young but wise Lovie Simone is best known for Selah and The Spades and The Craft: Legacy. Now she stars in the hit Netflix series Forever, an adaptation of the Judy Bloom book. On this episode, she talks about the giant role music plays in her preparation, why having a Black hair & make-up person on set is crucial to her work, “importance over relevance,” “quality over quantity,” her love of words “and the weight of each word,” the “accidental” way she and Michael Cooper Jr. built their Forever chemistry, plus much more. Back To One can be found […]

The post “The Nail Came Off, But We Got the Shot and That’s All That Matters”: Forever Star Lovie Simone, Back To One, Episode 342 first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.

Though Wes Anderson’s last consensus-acclaimed feature was 2014’s The Grand Budapest Hotel, his subsequent, progressively more divisive films have been profitable enough to emerge at a regular clip. I’m guessing this is thanks to the purchasing power of elder millennials who had Rushmore and Royal Tenenbaums imprinted on them in their teen years and now faithfully show up for each new work. For those unshakeable fans, myself included, the question of whether Anderson’s entered an era of baroque and inadvertent self-parody is a non-issue, and The Phoenician Scheme is unlikely to change anyone’s mind in either direction. Even by his […]

The post Cannes 2025: The Phoenician Scheme, Nouvelle Vague first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.

An autocrat forcing the populace to celebrate his birthday—where’s the novelty in that? Little children on terrifying birthday-dessert-making duties embarking on a perilous adventure in the big war torn city? Now that’s a story!  According to Iraqi director Hasan Hadi, that’s a story worth salvaging from Saddam Hussein’s reign that, along with the American wars, plagued audiences’ longterm perceptions of Iraq and its cinema. So, he decided to make his feature debut with The President’s Cake, a realistic yet fable-like narrative—a project developed at the Sundance Feature Film Program, then received an SFFILM Rainin Grant and was selected for preview […]

The post “Working with Non-Actors, Children, Animals, Crowds and on Water”: Hasan Hadi on Cannes 2025 Premiere The President’s Cake first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.

Eight years after Cannes dipped its toes into VR waters with their presentation of Alejandro González Iñárritu‘s ultra-haptic empathy machine Carne y Arena (2017), the festival’s general delegate Thierry Frémaux continues to promote cinema’s expanding XR toolbox. In addition to bringing back the festival’s Immersive Competition for a second year—from what I saw of the press tour held a few hours before the Opening Ceremony, it would be difficult to justify a third—Frémaux also, per an interview with Screen International, trained this year’s festival staff using an AI version of his own voice when he couldn’t be present to address them […]

The post Cannes 2025: Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning; Eddington; Sirât first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.

There’s something about the high-pressure nature of the migrant experience that can make films about it elicit more anxiety than your average thriller. So it is with Lloyd Lee Choi’s Lucky Lu. Set in New York’s Chinatown—a backdrop captured by DOP Norm Li as a caliginous labyrinth of alleyways and sepulchral rooms—Lee Choi’s feature debut centers on the titular Lu (Chang Chen), a Chinese delivery rider who’s spent years away from his wife and daughter, and now, having drummed up enough cash to secure an apartment for three, readies to welcome them to the city. Title notwithstanding, however, Lu might […]

The post “Anytime I Could Minimize the Use of Verbal Language and Rely on Other Means to Advance the Story, That’s What I Did”: Lloyd Lee Choi on His Cannes-Premiering Lucky Lu first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.

For most viewers, sharks and horror cinema were permanently conjoined with Steven Spielberg’s 1975 film Jaws, one of the first wide release summer blockbusters, and one with shocks far more intense than its PG rating would indicate. Today, shark horror has migrated to the small (and vertical) screen, with TikTok’s algorithm serving many of us — me, somewhat inexplicably, included — a never ending gallery of shark attacks, menacing underwater shark approaches and the occasional gliding shark beauty shot. Australian director Sean Byrne’s Cannes-premiering Dangerous Animals confidently mines these lingering fears and fascinations as it mashes up the shark horror […]

The post “You Think You’re Scared of These Creatures, Well, Look Into Our Own Dark Hearts”: Sean Byrne on His Cannes-Premiering Shark Attack Horror Film, Dangerous Animals   first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.