Film Snail

6.5

To Each His Own Cinema

NR·2007·100m

Comedy

Drama

Comedy

Drama

Summary

Commissioned to mark the 60th anniversary of the Cannes Film Festival, "To Each His Own Cinema" brought together 33 of the world's pre-eminent filmmakers to produce short pieces exploring the multifarious facets of cinema and their perspective on the state of their chosen artform in the early 21st century.

Cast

Pegah Ahangarani

Leonid Alexeenko

(segment "Irtebak")

Taraneh Alidoosti

Self

Dàvi Alvarado

Boy (segment "Anna")

Vishka Asayesh

George Babluani

The thief (segment "Recrudescence")

Cindy Beckett

Supporting

Caju

Self (segment "À 8 944 km de Cannes")

Castanha

Self (segment "À 8 944 km de Cannes")

Carl-Erik Calamnius

Ticket Man (segment "La Fonderie")

Josh Brolin

(segment "World cinema")

Luisa Williams

Anna (segment "Anna")

Michel Piccoli

Nikita Kruschev (segment "Rencontre unique")

João Bénard da Costa

Pope Jean XXIII (segment "Rencontre unique")

Antoine Chappey

Khrouchtchev's secretary (segment "Rencontre unique")

Farini Cheung Yui-Ling

The Woman (segment "I Travelled 9000 kilometers To ...")

Casper Christensen

(segment "The Last Dating Show")

David Cronenberg

The Suicidal Man (segment "At the suicide of the last Jew ...")

Audrey Dana

Claude Lelouch's mother (segment "Cinéma de boulevard")

Émilie Dequenne

The crying woman (segment "Dans l'obscurité")

Lionel Dray

The boyfriend (segment "Recrudescence")

Jean-Claude Dreyfus

The husband (segment "Cinéma érotique")

Yosra El Lozy

The girl (segment "47 Ans Après")

Deniz Gamze Ergüven

The young woman (segment "Recrudescence")

Sara Forestier

The usherette (segment "Cinéma érotique")

Jacques Frantz

The annoying businessman (segment "Occupations")

Grant Heslov

(segment "World cinema")

Frank Hvam

(segment "The Last Dating Show")

Kristian Ibler

(segment "The Last Dating Show")

Karim Kassem

Young Youssef Chahine (segment "47 Ans Après")

Takeshi Kitano

The projectionist (segment "Rencontre unique")

Joachim Knop

(segment "The Last Dating Show")

Édith Le Merdy

Wife (segment "Cinéma érotique")

Michael Lonsdale

The old blind man (segment "Le Don")

Li Man

The girl (segment "En Regardent le Film")

Lü Yulai

The projectionist (segment "En Regardent le Film")

Sara-Marie Maltha

(segment "The Last Dating Show")

Jeanne Moreau

The old woman / Self (segment "Trois Minutes")

Nanni Moretti

Nanni Moretti (segment "Diario di uno spettatore")

Denis Podalydès

The manager (segment "Cinéma de boulevard")

Brooke Smith

(segment "World cinema")

Yola Sanko

Crying Woman (segment "Dans le Noir")

Jérémie Segard

The thief (segment "Dans l'obscurité")

Joe Siffleet

Son (segment "Happy Ending")

Zinedine Soualem

Claude Lelouch's father (segment "Cinéma de boulevard")

Elia Suleiman

The filmmaker (segment "Irtebak")

Hedie Tehrani

Lars von Trier

The filmmaker (segment "Occupations")

Michel Vuillermoz

The groaning man (segment "Cinéma de boulevard")

Bradley Walsh

Father (segment "Happy Ending")

Isabelle Adjani

Self (segment "47 Ans Après") (archive footage)

Anouk Aimée

(segment "Cinéma de Boulevard") (archive footage)

Maury Chaykin

(segment "Artaud Double Bill") (archive footage)

Jean Cocteau

Self (segment "47 Ans Après") (archive footage)

Willem Dafoe

(segment "Occupations") (archive footage)

Bryce Dallas Howard

(segment "Occupations") (archive footage)

Anna Karina

(segment "Artaud Double Bill") (archive footage)

Kim Novak

Self (segment "47 Ans Après") (archive footage)

Shu Qi

Pregnant Woman

Golshifteh Farahani

Woman in Cinema (segment: Where Is My Romeo?)

Lee Kang-sheng

(segment: It’s A Dream)

Hamide Kheyrabadi

(segment: Where Is My Romeo?)

Duarte d'Almeida

Pope John XXIII (segment: Rencontre unique (Sole Meeting))

Fan Wing

The Woman ( segment: I Travelled 9000 km to Give It to You)

Michael Cimino

Miguel Cimino (segment: no translation needed)

Clayton Jacobson

Projectionist (segment: The Lady Bug)

Geneviève Lemon

Bug (segment: The Lady Bug)

Gina Clayton

Commentator (segment: At the Suicide of the Last Jew…)

Jesse Collins

Commentator (segment: At the Suicide of the Last Jew…)

Juliana Muñoz

Cuban Singer (segment: No Translation Needed)

Yves Corbet

Crew

Director

Lars von Trier

Director

David Cronenberg

Director

Wim Wenders

Director

Roman Polanski

Director

Gus Van Sant

Director

David Lynch

Director

Walter Salles

Director

Theo Angelopoulos

Director

Jane Campion

Director

Michael Cimino

Director

Ken Loach

Director

Claude Lelouch

Director

Bille August

Director

Youssef Chahine

Director

Chen Kaige

Director

Raymond Depardon

Director

Hou Hsiao-hsien

Director

Tsai Ming-liang

Director

Abbas Kiarostami

Director

Raúl Ruiz

Director

Elia Suleiman

Director, Screenplay

Takeshi Kitano

Director, Writer

Alejandro González Iñárritu

Director, Writer

Zhang Yimou

Director, Writer

Joel Coen

Director, Writer

Ethan Coen

Director, Writer

Wong Kar-wai

Director, Writer

Aki Kaurismäki

Director, Writer

Amos Gitai

Director, Writer

Olivier Assayas

Director, Writer

Luc Dardenne

Director, Writer

Atom Egoyan

Director, Writer

Jean-Pierre Dardenne

Director, Writer

Andrei Konchalovsky

Director, Writer

Nanni Moretti

Director, Writer

Manoel de Oliveira

Writer

William Chang

Writer

Zou Jingzhi

Reviews

CRCulver

August 14, 2018

TO EACH HIS OWN CINEMA is a 2007 collection of 3-minute shorts by some 36 directors around the world on the theme of what cinema means to them. So many auteurs already make films about films inasmuch as they allude to classics, but here most of the shorts are actually set in cinemas, with audiences in rows of seating. You'll need to have a decent familiarity with the arthouse canon before watching this, though. It's fascinating how so many of the directors, regardless of what continent they hailed from, choose to have French New Wave films playing in the background as their stories are told.

It opens with Raymond Depardon's "Open-Air Cinema", where a crowd of Egyptians watched an outdoor projection in Alexandria, and in spite of the unusual writing and the women's veils, they seem to be just like us. Zhang Yimou later does much the same in a Chinese village.

One of the remarkable aspects of this collection are the similar ideas. Two stories deal with thieves stealing purses in dark cinemas. Three deal with the blind and how they perceive cinema. Many look back to childhood/earlier eras. Hou Hsiao-Hsien's short recreates 1950s Taiwan on an elaborate set to show the typical visit to a cinema of his youth. Amos Gitai's film juxtaposes 1930s viewers of Yiddish cinema, a vibrant tradition destroyed by the Holocaust, with a modern Israeli audience in wartime. Youssef Chahine's looks back at his first visit to Cannes 47 years before.

Some of the films deal with serious political themes: Amos Gitai on the Israeli-Arab relations, David Croneberg on anti-semitism, and Bille August with Danish–immigrant relations. However, there are also a number of overtly funny shorts, like Takeshi Kitano's, where a working man's chance to unwind by watching a film keeps getting interrupted by problems with the projector. In Lars Van Trier's contribution, Jacques Franz plays an annoying businessman who can't stop bragging about his success, though the extreme gore and violence that follows makes for very black humour. Elia Suleiman's is Buster Keatonish physical comedy in the modern world.

Some shorts are notable for continuing an aesthetic that the director had already established in an earlier film. Kaurismäki's short is his usual style of an ostensibly contemporary setting, but with 1950s rock music and working class people who speak utterly deadpan. (Unusually, however, it uses none of his typical troupe of actors.) Abbas Kiarostami's "Where is My Romeo?" is a sort of follow-up to his experimental film SHIRIN, which showed only the faces of numerous women as they watched a classic Iranian tale of love; here these women are watching "Romeo and Juliet" instead.

All in all, this proved a continuously engaging film, whose 2-hour running time just flew by for me. Nearly all the shorts were entertaining, the sole exceptions for me being Jane Campion's oddball short, where an adult woman plays an insect that vexes a projectionist, and Gus Van Sant's film with a randy teenager entering into the film being projected. Nothing here seems a must-see classic, but if you like a few of the directors here, you're sure to enjoy this set.