US actor Harrison Ford speaks after receiving the Honorary Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival on May 18, 2023.
Harrison Ford bid a tearful farewell Thursday to the Indiana Jones character who helped build a legendary film career, and the Cannes Film Festival unexpectedly awarded him an honorary Palme d’Or at the premiere of the fifth film in the series.
Before a special screening of “Indiana Jones and the Call of Destiny,” the 80-year-old actor was called onstage, “Harrison, we have a surprise for you.”
It was one of the highlights of the 76th Cannes Film Festival, which had already presented an honorary Palm to fellow American actor Michael Douglas at the start of the event.
Tom Cruise received the same honor last year at the premiere of “Top Gun: Maverick.”
Ford, 80, seemed overwhelmed by a montage of some of his best scenes.
The actor said, “I am feeling very emotional. They say when you go to die you see your life flashing before your eyes, and that’s what I just saw. A big part of my life , but not for the rest of my life.”
“Kan, I love you too,” he thought.
– Fifteen years later –
The Indiana Jones saga began in 1981 with “Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark”, which was an immediate worldwide success.
The fourth episode was presented in Cannes in 2008, and the Hollywood star returns to the Croisette fifteen years later, this time under the direction of James Mangold.
On his way down the red carpet, the actor, accompanied by his wife, Calista Flockhart, stirred the crowd, especially when the famous music from the John Williams ballad played.
Other actors were also in the premiere, such as Phoebe Waller-Bridge from the series “Fleabag”, or Mads Mikkelsen.
Other personalities that can be seen on the red carpet include British director Steve McQueen or Chief Raoni Metucateire, a symbol of the indigenous struggle in Brazil.
The first four episodes of the saga were directed by Steven Spielberg.
At the end of the premiere director James Mangold said, “This film was made with the same dedication to everything we put forth.”
The action of this new chapter takes place in the late 1960s, but the writers have included a “flashback” that lasts several minutes requiring Ford’s face to be “rejuvenated” by the artificial intelligence, as a reminder of the changes to come. is another example of. audio-visual field.
Indiana Jones must don his hat and whip again to face old Nazi foes, obsessed with a dial created by none other than the Greek saint Archimedes…
– A 3h40 documentary –
Cannes usually alternates great Hollywood moments with more difficult propositions, and on this occasion it was the turn of “Youth Spring”, a 3h40 long feature-length documentary by Chinese director Wang Bing, to take the lead.
Bing is the kind of director who takes his time (on this occasion five years) to leave a filmic testimony to the profound social mutation his country experiences under the iron rod of Communist rule.
In “Youth Spring,” Bing follows with his camera the young people who leave their villages in the country’s interior by the millions to work piecemeal work in textile workshops in cities such as Shanghai.
Filmed discreetly, sometimes even surreptitiously, Bing’s works have won prizes in many competitions such as the Venice or Locarno festivals.
stands “The Ditch” (“La Fossa”, 2010), a denouement of forced labor camps for political prisoners in the Gobi Desert in the 1960s under Mao’s Reign of Terror.
Bing wrote and filmed “Correspondence” with Spanish director Jaime Rosales, which was released in 2011.
Chinese directors present at Cannes another documentary, “Man in Black”, filmed in a Paris theatre, with a single protagonist, exiled musician Wang Zhelin, naked on stage.
Another Palme d’Or contender, German Wim Wenders, is also submitting two works to Cannes: a fiction feature film, “Perfect Days”, in competition, and “Anselm”, a documentary about the artist Anselm Kiefer.
