‘Waltz with Bashir’ director returns to Cannes with sci-fi departure
Five years after he captivated audiences on the riviera with his trailblazing animation/live-action war story, Ari Folman offers star-studded ‘The Congress’ — ‘something entirely different’
Adiv Sterman is a breaking news editor at The Times of Israel.
‘The Congress,” a new film by the celebrated Israeli director Ari Folman, was screened Thursday to a live audience of film writers, directors and critics in the French Riviera on the first day of the two-week Cannes Film Festival.
Folman is by no means a first-timer at the festival, which critics and filmmakers largely consider the world’s most influential cinema event outside the Oscars. In 2008, the director’s acclaimed “Waltz with Bashir” took Cannes by storm and established him as a major artistic force within the industry.
The 2008 film, which was nominated for the Best Foreign Language Film at the Oscars, dealt with Folman’s own experiences as a soldier reflecting on the Sabra and Shatila massacres during Israel’s 1982 Lebanon War.
“The Congress,” a semi-psychedelic sci-fi drama based loosely on the novel “The Futurological Congress” by Polish author Stanislaw Lem, follows Robin Wright as herself — an aging actress who decides to sell a film studio the rights to duplicate her cinematic character in the hopes of achieving eternal fame and youth.
Similarly to “Waltz with Bashir,” “The Congress” showcases Folman’s signature animated story line, spliced with live-action scenes.
“The Congress” was filmed in California and the animation was designed and produced in Israel by the same team that created “Waltz with Bashir.”
After the screening, the crowd stayed for a discussion with actors Danny Huston and Sami Gayle, who were also among the film’s cast. The film also stars such Hollywood hotshots as Harvey Keitel, Jon Hamm and Paul Giamatti. The big-name actors all participated in the film without compensation.
Still, most of the questions in the session were directed at the enigmatic Folman.
“I’ve loved science fiction from a young age and read everything translated into Hebrew at the time,” Folman told the audience. “After ‘Waltz with Bashir’ I was looking to do something entirely different, and so I chose [‘The Futurological Congress’].”
Critics at the festival reportedly had very positive initial reactions to the film.
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