Cannes 2015: a no-selfie zone

The 2015 Cannes festival looks set to be an interesting one, even by Cannes standards.

The omens are certainly promising: one common belief among Cannes watchers is that great selections tend to be followed by disappointing ones, in turn followed by more first-class selections. After 2013’s excellent edition and last year’s comparatively less-than-overwhelming one, festival followers have high expectations for this year’s offerings and Thursday’s announcement of films nominated for this year's festival is certainly promising.

One flick to keep an eye on is Yorgos Lanthimos’s The Lobster, a sci-fi comedy starring Rachel Weisz, Colin Farrell, John C Reilly and Léa Seydoux set in a hotel in a dystopian future, where the residents must find a spouse within 45 days or face being transformed into wild animals.

Another interesting competitor is new writer-director kid on the block Sweden’s Magnus von Horn, whose debut entry The Here After, about a young jail-bird’s return to society, screens in the Director’s Fortnight line-up. The feature film’s Polish cinematographer , Lukasz Zal, was also nominated for an Oscar this year for his work on  Ida.

UK films, with the exception Amy, Asif Kapadia’s Amy Whitehouse documentary, are conspicuous by their absence from Cannes this year.

Amongst the entries carrying high expectations is Youth, starring Michael Caine as a retired conductor, by Italian director Paolo Sorrentino. Sorrentino won the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film last year with his Fellini-esque masterpiece The Great Beauty.

Celebrity pairings expected to be posing for photographs outside the Palais des Festivals include Vincent Cassel and Salma Hayek, who star in Tale of Tales, a fairy-tale horror story from the director of Gomorrah; Michael Fassbender and Marion Cotillard, interpreting a Shakespearean classic in Justin Kurzel’s Macbeth; and Matthew McConaughey and Naomi Watts in Gus Van Sant’s The Sea of Trees.

The 68th Cannes Film Festival, which will run from May 13th to 25th this year, will also feature the out-of-competition world premier of Mad Max: Fury Road, starring Tom Hardy and Charlize Theron on the second day of the festival.

Attendees have been warned that the festival will be a “no-selfie” zone. The Festival’s director, Thierry Frémaux, has said he believes that taking a taking a photo of yourself is “ridiculous and grotesque”, and will discourage celebrities from the practice.

"We don't want to prohibit it, but we want to slow down the process of selfies on the steps," he said. “You never look as ugly as you do in a selfie."