India returns to Cannes Film Festival with Neeraj Ghayawan’s Homebound
This year, India's Homebound by Neeraj Ghaywan will be part of the 12-day Festival's Un Certain Regard – the second most prestigious category after Competition.
One of the highlights of the Cannes Film Festival is the poster, and it is revealed around three weeks before the 12-day event kicks in on the picturesque French Riviera. The poster is treated like a souvenir that many take back home.
This year, the poster was unveiled on Tuesday. And for the first time in the 78- year history of the Festival, it will be a double poster. What is it we see: A man and a woman in a passionate embrace on a deserted beach under a turbulent sky.
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The Festival explains: “Eternity lasts but a moment..It was 60 years ago. In 1965, two damaged beings played by Anouk Aimée and Jean-Louis Trintignant met, charmed each other, resisted, and finally twirled under Claude Lelouch’s incandescent camera. The Palme d’or in Cannes in 1966, the two Oscars in Hollywood in 1967 and the dozens of awards around the world pale in comparison to this grandiose moment of tenderness, simplicity and beauty”
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Reportedly, it is the seventh arts’ most celebrated embrace, “because you can’t separate a man and a woman who love each other, because you can’t separate that Man from that Woman, the Festival de Cannes has chosen for the first time in its history to present a double official poster. A Man and a Woman. Side by side. Back together”.
Both Aimee and Trintignant won awards at Cannes – Best Actor (Z, 1969) and Best Actress (A Leap in the Dark, 1980). Sadly both are gone, and the posters will be a poignant reminder of how lovely they were. How very much in love they appear to be.
The Festival adds: “These two posters also pay homage. Magnificent heroes of delicacy and seduction, Anouk Aimée and Jean-Louis Trintignant forever illuminate the film of our lives, like these two posters, whose colours express the intensity of a passionate love that triumphs over despair. This light no longer comes from the heavens, today troubled on all sides by dark clouds; it emerges from the radiant fusion of two beings who reconcile us with life”
The festival plays from 13–24 May.
The writer, a senior movie critic and author, has been covering Cannes Film Festival for over three decades
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