Rodrigo Sorogoyen to Serve as Jury President at This Year’s Cannes Critics’ Week

Rodrigo Sorogoyen is taking the lead at this year’s Cannes Critics’ Week

The 42-year-old Spanish film director and screenwriter, best known for his 2023 feature The Beasts, has been revealed as the jury president for this year’s edition of Cannes Critics’ Week.

Rodrigo SorogoyenThe parallel Cannes section devoted to emerging talents and first and second features will unfold from May 15 to 23 this year.

“It is a big responsibility, which I look forward to,” Sorogoyen said in a video statement on X announcing his presidency.

“La Semaine de la Critique supports and rewards first and second feature films as well as short films, thus providing vital support to cinema, new voices, and new ways to tell stories. Without these new voices, there would be no new cinema. They’re the ones who make it live and make it work.”

Sorogoyen’s last film, The Beasts, debuted at Cannes in 2022 and dominated the main prizes at the 37th edition of Spain’s Goya Awards, taking home nine gongs, including best film and director.

The film’s story follows a middle-aged French couple who move to a small village, seeking closeness with nature. However, their presence inflames two locals to the point of outright hostility and shocking violence.

The Beasts also picked up wins for best screenplay, leading actor and supporting actor.

The year’s Critics Week lineup will be announced in the next few weeks.

The official Cannes Film Festival lineup will be announced on April 11.

Fonzi to Star in Horror Film “El diablo blanco”

Dolores Fonzi has landed a devilish role…

The 37-year-old Argentine actress is set to star in the horror film El diablo blanco, converting the project into one of the highest-profile genre offerings coming down the pike in Latin America.

Dolores Fonzi

Fonzi joins an Argentine A-list cast that includes Esteban Lamothe and Julieta Zylberberg.

Juan Pablo Gugliotta, co-founder of Buenos Aires’ Magma Cine, a pioneer in pan-Latin American co-production and auteur genre movies, will introduce the horror movie to potential co-production partners and sales agents at next week’s Bogota Audiovisual Market (BAM).

The screenplay allows the involvement of one or two actors from outside Argentina, Gugliotta said.

The feature debut of Ignacio Rogers, a theater actor-turned-filmmaker who is writing the screenplay, El diablo blanco kicks off with three male friends going off camping in the mountains. They meet three girls and immediately hit it off. Romance flowers as they decide to continue the trip together. One of them, Fernando, has a strange encounter with a mysterious man and suffers premonitory dreams of this man killing people, after which a once-carefree holiday trip turns into a ghastly nightmare.

El diablo blanco has its origins in classic American horror, but at least two factors set it apart, said Gugliotta. One is the presence of “deep Latin American roots, Argentine indigenous myths and legends.”

El diablo blanco’s friends are also not teens but adults in their mid-to-late-thirties, one a divorcee, another about to inherit local land, and two of the women qualified anthropologists, searching for traces of the mountains’ original indigenous settlers.

About 60% of “The White Devil’s” budget is covered between Magma Cine’s own financing and subsidy from Argentina’s Incaa film board, Gugliotta said.

Fonzi, Lamothe and Zylberberg have all broken through to international recognition this decade. Fonzi toplined Santiago Mitre’s Paulina, which won the Cannes Critics’ Week Grand Prize last year; Lamothe was the star of Mitre’s debut, The Student. Zylberberg co-starred in Anna Katz’s My Friend From the Park, a Sundance Film Festival 2016 best screenplay winner.

El diablo blanco is scheduled to shoot in the first quarter of 2017, during Argentina’s summer.

Garcia Bernal to Star in The Ardor with Alice Braga

Gael Garcia Bernal to the rescue…

The 33-year-old Mexican actor will star opposite I Am Legend’s Alice Braga in The Ardor, a modern-day Western set in the Amazon.

Gael Garcia Bernal

Directed by Argentine helmer Pablo Fendrik, centers on a lone Amazon shaman (Garcia Bernal) who stumbles across a tobacco farmer and his stunning daughter (Braga) in the jungle. When a roving band of deforesters attack the farm, killing the farmer and taking his daughter hostage, Garcia Bernal’s character decides to exact revenge.

The feature, Fendrik’s follow-up to Blood Appears, a highlight of Cannes Critics Week in 2008, is described as a tale of survival and revenge set in in the Amazon jungle.

Garcia Bernal, the star of the just released The Loneliest Planet, has been getting rave reviews for his latest film No.

The Brazilian bombshell Braga, meantime, will next appear opposite Kristen Stewart in On The Road.

The Ardor begins shooting in the Amazon in March for a planned fall 2013 release.