Newly announced titles for Love & Anarchy examine iconic characters, taboo subjects, societal topics and surprising perspectives. Works by familiar festival favourites such as Romanian director Radu Jude and Argentina’s Lucrecia Martel will be seen at this year’s festival. Emerging directing talent will include Elliott Tuttle, whose work has sparked discussion in film circles, and Judith Godrèche, one of the leading figures in the French metoo-movement. The entire programme for Love & Anarchy will be unveiled on 1 September. The festival will take place 17–27 September.
Radu Jude, one of the most original directors in the industry today, will present two different sides of himself at this year’s festival. With his adaptation of Dracula, the iconoclast of arthouse sinks his teeth into AI and into the flesh of neoliberal Romania. Will the titular vampire – Romania’s most famous monster – pale in comparison to the horrors of the modern age? Compared to the ferocious formal funhouse of Dracula, the director’s second festival gem, The Diary of a Chambermaid is downright reserved, even carefully optimistic. The coexistence of an Eastern European housekeeper and an upper-middle-class French family does offer some sharp insights, too, as East meets West, politeness meets contempt, and high class meets lowbrow. Enduring critical darling Lucrecia Martel offers a more straightforward social commentary, this time in the form of a documentary. Landmarks tackles land disputes, the murder of indigenous man Javier Chocobar, and the scars of colonialism.
Is it really possible to see a new Kurosawa samurai film at Love & Anarchy? Yes! Granted, we are referring to Kiyoshi Kurosawa, a current Japanese filmmaker known for his genre-bending and psychologically tormenting works. The Samurai and the Prisoner, a murder mystery wrapped in a 16th-century period piece, is an adaptation of a novel by Honobu Yonezava. A Girl’s Story is based on the memoir of a more universally known writer, the Nobel-winning Annie Ernaux. In this drama, a writer returns to her hometown, to the site of the sexual violence she experienced when she was a young adult. The director of the film, Judith Godréche, has been candid about her own experiences with assault at a young age. The shadow of sexual violence also haunts Blue Film. The film, directed by American filmmaker Elliot Tuttle, has generated discussion over its themes: A sex worker spends the night with his former middle school teacher. Was the client already attracted to him when he was a child?
Love & Anarchy’s programme explores the whole spectrum of the human experience – but does not limit itself to just humankind. Hen, from Hungarian director Pálfi György is a small-scale masterpiece in the More than Human -programme section. Its titular character goes on adventures and witnesses humans treating each other as badly as they treat other animals. Spanish filmmaker Júlia Coldwell Serra’s Nobody Barks will play in the same section. Serra’s absurd short film finds humour in discomfort, which begins with a dead dog and a well-meaning lie.