And these aren’t for the faint hearted, you’ll see. 

Trickles of first announcements are coming in from the Festival de Cannes, which this year takes place on the Croisette, as usual, from Tuesday May 14th to Saturday May 25th, 2024.

A first film has been announced, not to be confused of course with the opening film. In fact, the highly anticipated Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga, helmed by Australian director, screenwriter and producer George Miller will be revealed in the presence of the director and the cast — led by Anya Taylor-Joy, Chris Hemsworth and Tom Burke.

The cinematic event will be screened as an Out of Competition Gala session at the Grand Théâtre Lumière at the Palais des Festivals on Wednesday May 15th.

Mad Max (1979), Mad Max II: The Challenge (1981), Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome (1985), Mad Max: Fury Road (2015) and now Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga (2024): in 5 episodes and through almost 5 decades, George Miller has created a cathartic myth, even a cathartic mythology. Mad Max is a chronicle of societal and environmental collapse, playing with genre codes to question these themes, initially visionary and now cruelly topical. Originally filmed in the Australian Outback, this revisited “Western  on wheels” describes a dystopian world where speed and movement are just as synonymous with life energy as with death as a result of resource depletion, offering the viewer a dose of adrenaline rarely equalled on the big screen.

Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga is the latest episode and to those who have been going to the movies lately, the trailer does look amazing! It returns to the origins of Furiosa, the new saga-heroine who appeared in Mad Max: Fury Road, rewarded with several Oscars. Actress Anya Taylor-Joy plays the young Furiosa, played in Fury Road by Charlize Theron, trying to return home, despite numerous hostile armed gangs.

“The idea of this prequel has been with me for over a decade,” said George Miller. “I couldn’t be more thrilled to return to the Festival de Cannes – along with Anya, Chris and Tom – to share Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga. There is no better place than La Croisette to experience this film with audiences on the world stage.”

Earlier last week, the festival also announced the six new faces participating in La Résidence of the Festival.

The sextet, which includes last year’s Un Certain Regard prize winner Molly Manning Walker, along with Swedish director Ernst De Geer, Anastasiia Solonevych from Ukraine, Cambodian filmmaker Danech San, Daria Kashcheeva, an indie filmmaker from the Czech Republic and Indonesian director and writer Aditya Ahmad, will be in residence in Paris’s 9th arrondissement from March 15th to July 31st, 2024. The six new residents took up residence following the last session, comprising Meltse Van Coillie, Diana Cam Van Nguyen, Hao Zhao, Gessica Généus, Andrea Slaviček and Asmae El Moudir. These two sessions will be reunited for the 77th edition of the Festival de Cannes to be held from May 14th to the 25th.

Formerly a DoP, Manning Walker, whose directorial debut How To Have Sex premiered last year in Cannes in Un Certain Regard and went on to win the Un Certain Regard Prize said: “I am super happy that Cannes continues to support my career. I can’t wait to get writing in Paris. It comes at the perfect time for me after a long press tour. I look forward to being surrounded by other creatives and their ideas.”

Since the reorganization of La Résidence in 2022, filmmakers are now selected both by call for applications and by invitation, with Stéphanie Lamome in charge of the project. Created in 2000, La Résidence has played host to over 250 directors from around 60 countries. A number of these directors, invited to the biggest festivals around the world, have had international success: Lucrecia Martel, Kornél Mundruczó, Sebastián Lelio, Antonio Campos, Karim Aïnouz, Jonas Carpignano, etc.

Last but not least, the Directors’ Fortnight has unveiled a new award, named “The People’s Choice” — an audience favorite prize — to be handed out for the first time during the upcoming edition of the Festival de Cannes. The award is supported by the Fondation Chantal Akerman, and will see the winning filmmaker receiving a €7,500 prize, to be presented at the closing ceremony.

The Directors’ Fortnight section is traditionally non-competitive, though there have been a number of partner prizes awarded during past editions, including the SACD prize for best French-language feature and the Europa Cinemas’ award for best European film. These will continue on, joining the youngest prize in the family, which belongs to the audience — as cinema ultimately always does.

For more information about the six participating individuals this year, check out the announcement on the Festival de Cannes website.

All images courtesy of the Festival de Cannes, used with permission.