Cannes: unsold gems: the best films still distributed in the United States

THR highlights the best films on the festival circuit that have yet to land a U.S. distribution deal.

The kitchen
Directed by Alonso Ruizpalacios
Sales WME Independent, fifth season

Anthony Bourdain giving American readers an insight into the rock’n’roll restaurant industry in Confidential cooking From Nancy Meyers’ citrus-studded white marble countertops to enviable family kitchens, the modern American public has become infatuated with cooking. Although previously largely reserved for the non-fiction space with entries like Bourdain’s No reservations and the Netflix opera The chef’s tablethe narrative possibilities from the dark underbelly of restaurant staff have begun to emerge of late. The bear, the anxiety-inducing FX series about a Chicago Italian beef restaurant, won the Emmys in January and is poised to do the same this go-around. Enter director Ruizpalacios The kitchen. “Think The bear “I’m doing cocaine with a Red Bull chaser and you get a sense of the sustained intensity and simmering pressure of this murderous tragi-comedy about what the diners (mostly) don’t see during a day of working at a busy Times Square restaurant,” it read. THRfrom the review of the Berlin Film Festival, where the film was selected in competition. Ruizpalacios, who once worked as a dishwasher in a busy London tourist trap, directs Rooney Mara and Raúl Briones in his English-language debut. Unlike many other cooking offerings, La Cocina focuses largely on the restaurant industry’s immigrant workforce and also features a romance between a short-order cook (Briones) and a waitress (Mara ). It’s an intense yet humanistic glimpse into a world we don’t see much on screen.

union
The story of Stephen Maing and Brett
Sales Submarine

The Sundance Film Festival was the first festival to take place after the two strikes that brought the Hollywood industry to a halt, making it a particularly interesting time to unveil union. The on-the-ground documentary takes viewers inside the attempts to unionize Amazon workers on Staten Island, the nation’s most high-profile labor movement in recent years, which is saying something considering the summer of 2023 has been nicknamed “the hot summer of work”. .”

Offering impressive access and even more impressive restraint, the film focuses on a new Amazonian union and its leader Chris Smalls, as well as the union’s organizers and potential members. “Without demeaning the heroism of Smalls’ crusade or underestimating the general inhumanity of Amazon’s treatment of its lowest-ranking workers, union is intended to be something closer to a warts-and-alls documentary,” it reads THRThe Sundance review. Sure, there’s a heated confrontation with police and cellphone footage of the company’s anti-union propaganda, but the film doesn’t shy away from the monotony and disillusionment that comes with the hard-fought unionization fight.

Any studio, streamer, or specialty label with a news-focused sister company will definitely find value in union. The fight for the Amazon union is undoubtedly a story that someone is likely to fictionalize one day, but Maing and Story’s documentary contains all the drama and intrigue that a narrative feature could offer.

Finally dawn
Saverio Costanzo
Sales UTA

Saverio Costanzo’s homage to the cinematic legacy of Federico Fellini and the “Hollywood on the Tiber” era of Rome’s Cinecittà studio would seem to be an ideal choice for film buffs everywhere. The feature film, which premiered in Venice last year, features a star-making performance from Italian star Rebecca Antonaci as an innocent swept up in a wild night straight out of The sweet life, as she accompanies a Liz Taylor-style American film diva, played to the hilt by Lily James, and her slightly shady entourage, led by Willem Dafoe as an American expat art dealer and Rachel Sennott as a rising actress. who wants to be the next queen of Hollywood. Costanzo directed Adam Driver in the 2014 romantic thriller Hungry hearts, but he is probably best known to American viewers as the creator and showrunner of the hit HBO series My brilliant friend. Finally dawn is an exuberant love letter to cinema, and the sets are a treat for fans of Italian cinema. But Costanzo also brings the same feel for the period-precise details that made My brilliant friend shine. The film takes a completely cynical view of narcissistic actors and remains lucid about the cold business behind all this cinematic magic. Finally dawn is a grand feast, clocking in at nearly two and a half hours, but those distributors and audiences who choose to delve into it will be richly rewarded.

There is still tomorrow
Paola Cortellesi

Paola Cortellesi’s debut film is nothing short of a phenomenon. The black-and-white comedy-drama broke box office records, earning an estimated $40 million in Italy alone, surpassing barbie to become the biggest film in the territory last year. Set in Rome in 1946, days before the first-ever Italian referendum in which women were able to vote, There is still tomorrow sees Cortellesi, one of Italy’s best-known actresses and comedians, playing Delia, a woman with an abusive and idiotic husband (Perfect strangers star Valerio Mastandrea) who aspires to emancipation for herself and for her daughter. The film’s success sparked a national political movement in Italy to combat domestic violence. There is still tomorrow was screened in the Italian Senate on the occasion of the United Nations International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women. Hundreds of thousands of high school students across the country were screened.

But what’s impressive is Cortellesi’s sure hand behind the camera. She balances the story’s tragic and romantic elements with doses of precise comic genius and a visual momentum that channels the style of Italian neorealism but filters it through the prism of 21st century feminism. At Italy’s national film awards, the David Di Donatellos, Cortellesi cleaned house, winning awards for best new director, best actress and best screenplay. American buyers spooked by an Italian period film should give this comedic gem another look.

Dying
Matthias Glasner
Sales The match factory

To quote THRfrom the review of the Berlin Film Festival, that of Matthias Glasner Dying is full of “life, death and everything in between”. Glasner goes broke in his eighth feature, delivering a magnum opus about family dysfunction. By turns terribly sad and terribly dark, the film also manages, despite its subject (aging, death, depression and addiction, among others), to be incredibly funny.

The story centers on Tom, a Berlin conductor (a phenomenal Lars Eidinger) battling both personal and professional demons. He struggles to put on a performance of “Sterben” (“Die”), an original composition by his suicidal best friend, Bernard (Robert Gwisdek), but is constantly drawn into the whirlwind of his unstable family. His icy and acerbic mother (Corinna Harfouch) is dying of cancer. Her wild, alcoholic sister (Lilith Stangenberg) has begun an affair with a married man. His kind father (Hans-Uwe Bauer) suffers from Parkinson’s disease and advanced dementia and tends to wander the streets without pants.

Although American buyers were initially put off by the inauspicious title, the film’s three-hour running time (it pays off every minute), and the superficial details of the plot, the critical reception of the Dying should encourage them to take another look. Glasner won the award for best screenplay in Berlin and on May 3, the German Film Academy awarded him the Lola, the German equivalent of the Oscar, as best film of the year.