Yesterday saw the announcement of the competition lineup at the 2013 Cannes Film Festival, but the list isn’t done yet. While additional Out of Competition titles are yet to be announced, we also have the Critics Week (Semaine de la Critique) as well as the Directors’ Fortnight (Quinzaine) selections, the latter of which now has an official opening night film.
The festival announced this morning Ari Folman‘s The Congress will serve as the Quinzaine opener, which will begin one day after The Great Gatsby officially opens the fest on May 15.
For those not immediately familiar with Folman, you’ll likely remember him as the director of Waltz with Bashir, which was nominated for Best Foreign Language film in 2009.
The Congress is shot in a slightly similar way in that it will rotoscope live-action performances, but will also include some live-action sequences in its narrative, which, if memory serves me correctly, did not happen in the heart of Bashir‘s narrative.
The film is described as a loose adaptation of Stanislaw Lem’s “The Futurological Congress,” a 1971 black humor science fiction detailing the exploits of the hero of a number of his books, Ijon Tichy, as he visits the Eighth World Futurological Congress at the Costa Rica Hilton. The book is Lem’s take on the common sci-fi trope of an apparently Utopian future that turns out to be an illusion. Robin Wright, Kodi Smit-McPhee, Paul Giamatti and Danny Huston are among the cast.
Several additional films will be added to the Directors’ Fortnight lineup, which I will have for you once they are announced along with the complete Semaine de la Critique lineup. I’ve added The Congress to yesterday’s complete 2013 Cannes selection, which you can browse right here and will continue to be updated as more films are announced.
