It's Not Me (Leos Carax, 2024)

Leos Carax's magnificent, striking essay film It's Not Me is an experimental piece that delves into the mind of its elusive maker; one of cinema's most enigmatic auteurs, Carax has made just a handful of films in a career that spans more than four decades.  This 42-minute film—whose running time sees it classed as a feature in the US and UK but not in its director's native France—offers a welcome glimpse into Carax's private and professional worlds.  The film is a reflective, byzantine journey in which Carax mixes excerpts from his and others' movies with newly shot footage to create a patchwork view of his career and influences.  Carax has experienced his share of tragedy, but a more uplifting aspect of his personal life is represented by the inclusion of his daughter Nastya among It's Not Me's eclectic cast.

The film also features Denis Lavant, an actor who has starred in four of Carax's six previous feature films, who here reprises his role as the unnerving Monsieur Merde from anthology film Tokyo! and Holy Motors.  It's Not Me's narrative is at once chaotic and controlled, a testament to Carax's ability to weave disparate elements into a cohesive, satisfying whole.  The film is littered with nods to his earlier works, such as Les amants du Pont-Neuf, Annette and the aforementioned Holy Motors, as well as references to several cinematic luminaries, particularly Jean-Luc Godard, whose essay film aesthetic greatly informs the look, feel and sound of this self-portrait.  Like Godard's final film—the coruscating The Image Book—It's Not Me is a densely packed work, one whose brevity belies its depth and scope.

In terms of visual style, It's Not Me is almost slavishly Godardian, with its choppy edits, bold intertitles and occasionally confrontational imagery serving to recall the work of the most obtuse member of the New Wave—yet Carax's film possesses a warmth that was never present in the oeuvre of his cantankerous idol.  As Carax offsets black-and-white clips against hyper-saturated colour sequences, the film's diverse soundtrack—which includes several Bowie classics, one of which is hidden in a post-credits scene—further enhances the emotional impact of these eye-popping images.  Yet one of the most moving aspects of It's Not Me is Carax's own voiceover, which is both illuminating and self-deprecating as it offers some insight into this singular filmmaker's working methods and artistic touchstones.

Darren Arnold

Images: BFI

Cannes Film Festival 2025: IFFR-Backed Selections

A spread of films and talent presented at IFF Rotterdam's CineMart and backed by the Hubert Bals Fund are once again a fixture of the Cannes lineup in 2025. Catalan filmmaker Carla Simón brings her family trilogy to a close with Romería, a moving story of love, yearning and family anguish, this time through an adolescent lens as orphan Marina travels to meet her grandparents in Spain. Erige Sehiri's second feature Promised Sky focuses on a pastor whose home becomes a refuge for Naney, a young mother seeking a better future, and Jolie, a strong-willed student, before an orphan girl arrives and tests their solidarity.

Italian-American filmmaker duo Alessio Rigo de Righi and Matteo Zoppis continue their investigation into the legends and myths of Italian folklore with the surrealist Italy-set Western Testa o croce? (Heads or Tails?). The name derives from a bet between Buffalo Bill’s American cowboys (who visited Italy with their Wild West Show in 1890) and Italian cowboys over which team was better at taming wild horses. The film follows two young lovers on the run, played by rising French star Nadia Tereszkiewicz (Red Island) and Italy’s Alessandro Borghi (The Eight Mountains), with John C. Reilly co-starring as Buffalo Bill.

Renowned Japanese filmmaker Koji Fukada has made a number of highly acclaimed features across the last fifteen years dealing with “domestic disequilibrium”, including Harmonium (2016)—which won the Un Certain Regard Jury Prize at Cannes—A Girl Missing (2019), The Real Thing (2020) and Love Life (2022). Inspired by real cases in Japan, his latest, Love on Trial, follows Mai, a rising J-Pop idol whose big break is threatened when she falls in love, violating the “no love” clause in her contract. The project was presented at CineMart in 2022, where it picked up the IFFR Young Selectors Award.

March is mourning his wife Nat—who has recently passed away due to dust pollution—when he discovers her spirit has returned by possessing the vacuum cleaner. So begins the premise of Thai filmmaker Ratchapoom Boonbunchachoke’s unique, playful, genre-mixing debut A Useful Ghost (pictured top). Boonbunchachoke’s short Red Aninsri; Or, Tiptoeing on the Still Trembling Berlin Wall won the Junior Jury award at Locarno in 2020. A Useful Ghost was supported by the HBF+Europe: Minority Co-production Support scheme in 2023, where it received €60,000 of production financing.

Source: IFFR

Image: THE PR FACTORY

Cannes Film Festival 2025: Belgian Selections

Several Belgian-funded titles will be screening at this month's Cannes Film Festival (13–24 May), including Cédric Klapisch's Colours of Time, Sylvain Chomet's The Magnificent Life of Marcel Pagnol and Momoko Seto's Dandelion's Odyssey. In Colours of Time, four cousins discover they share a mysterious family history; in 1895, their ancestor Adèle, then aged 21, leaves her hometown to search for her mother in a Paris bustling with newfound avant-garde creativity. As her descendants retrace her steps, they unravel Adèle's past. The two timelines of 1895 and 2024 intertwine and collide, confronting the cousins’ contemporary attitudes with life in late 19th-century Paris, leaving everyone’s future forever changed.

Animated Luxembourgish co-production The Magnificent Life of Marcel Pagnol focuses on the eponymous author. At the height of his fame, Pagnol is commissioned by the editor-in-chief of a major women’s magazine to write a literary serial, in which he is free to recount his childhood. As he pens the opening pages, the child he once was—little Marcel—suddenly appears before him. In fellow animated title Dandelion's Odyssey, four dandelion achenes that survive a series of nuclear explosions are propelled into the cosmos. After crash-landing on an unknown planet, they set out in search of soil where their species might survive. However, they must face countless obstacles: the elements, fauna, flora, the climate.

Source/images: THE PR FACTORY