Hey folks, Harry here with the wonderful Celia and the reports on Cannes. Can't wait to hear about the twenty minutes of BROTHERS GRIMM that screened, and the word on KILOMETRE ZERO and BASHING is very intriguing. Here ya go... another Cannes at AICN...

What a day ! I spent quite some time queuing, that's how you know you're back in Cannes ! I've also not been really satisfied by the 2 films I've seen today. But I got some really nice goodies from 20th Century Fox (Star Wars press sheet and promo CD, wow !) and interesting pieces of info.

INFOS :

"Blood and Bones", a Yoichi Sai film, will star Takeshi Kitano as a man obsessed by the idea of being rich and who sacrifices evrything to reach his goal. The film will hit French theatres on July 20th.

20 minutes of "Brothers Grimm", the latest Terry Gilliam film starring Matt Damon, will be screened tomorrow at the Olympia Theatre. Harvey Weinstein will attend the screeening.

Colin Firth is in for a peplum ! He will star in "The Last Legion", with Ben Kingsley, a film about the fall of the Roman Empire.

FILMS :

Hiner Saleem's "Kilometre Zero"

"Kilometre Zero" takes place in 1988 in Iraq. Kurds are oppressed and killed by the Iraqian regime. A Kurd man, named Ako, has no choice but to become a soldier in the iraqian army and he has to leave his wife and son, though his wish is to run away with them.

The film follows Ako : how much the Iraqis despise the Kurds, Ako's first steps in the iraqian army... Ako then has to bring back the corpse of another soldier to his family, back in Kurdistan.

Then begins a quite jolting journey through Iraq.

Ako's silences and empty landscapes don't fill in the film which seems long and not that interesting. Some sly humour, typical Middle-Eastern, appears from time to time to keep the interest up.

But the film director's goal seems to be making a political film, about the non-understanding between Iraqis and Kurds, about the absurd and horrible oppression the latters endure. It even begins and end on a positive note about the American invasion of Irak.

"Kilometre Zero" could have been a polemical film, a film that makes you realise about the Kurd tragedy... But the film is much too slow for that !

Kobayashi Masahiro's "Bashing"

Yuko is a young Japanese woman who was a volunteer worker in Iraq until she was being held hostage, then released. "Bashing" shows us a difficult return to Japan and how she is rejected by her country's society.

Fired from her job, she will also be the reason her father is fired from his. He is the only one to support her and tells her not to give up to pressures she endures in their small industrial town. But he won't be as strong as she is.

"Bashing" is a very strong film about Japanese society which is shown under an unflattering light. Japanese are shown as cold, obsessed in the idea of honor, lacking of understanding and compassion. Some shots are even psychologically violents for a Japanese movie : a man is seen crying or even begging.

Other moments of the film are also very strong, like the breaking up between Yuko and her boyfriend who blames her for being still alive.

Sadly, the film suffers from the lack of music which makes silences and some moments seem very long. It's a pity because that's a film with a very interesting theme !

Tomorrow the much awaited Gus Van Sant "Last days" is screened, starring Michael Pitt and Asia Argento. And there will be a rush to two kinds of tickets : first for the Johnnie To film and then for the Star Wars gala screening !