Newly Restored Version of Kurosawa's Ran to Screen on the Beach
Digital screenings will dominate at this year's Cannes Film Festival, with projector manufacturer Christie supplying 31 Solaria-series digital projectors to the festival. And for the first time this year, Christie said, one of the festival's open-air screenings at the Cinema de la Plage on Macé Beach will take place in 4K.
"We were already providing CP4230s for the 4K in all the bigger halls such as Lumiere, Debussy and Soixantième," according to Christie's regional sales director for France, Pascal Gervais, in a prepared statement. The CP4230 was installed at the Cinema de la Plage specifically for screening a new 4K restoration of Akira Kurosawa's Ran perfomed by Éclair under the supervision of StudioCanal and with color-grading approved by cinematographer Shôji Ueda. "The projector can switch from 4K to 2K, depending on which film is showing, so other material can be screened," Gervais noted.
The festival also requested "several" of Christie's SKA-3D processors, which converts HDMI output from a Blu-ray Disc player to a digital cinema format for screening. "It's a simple switch but makes the Festival's organizers' lives much easier," Gervais said.
Among the high-profile screenings that take place at Cannes, which opens tomorrow, will be a Thursday premiere of Mad Max: Fury Road, which screens out of competition at the Grand Théâtre Lumière. Films screening in competition include Carol, directed by Todd Haynes; Louder Than Bombs, directed by Joachim Trier; Mia Madre, directed by Nanni Moretti; The Assassin, directed by Hou Hsiao-Hsien; Mountains May Depart, directed by Jia Zhang-Ke; The Lobster, directed by Yorgos Lanthimos; The Sea of Trees, directed by Gus Van Sant; and Our Little Sister, directed by Hirokazu Kore-Eda.
Other classic films to screen at the festival include a 4K restoration of Rocco and His Brothers (Visconti, 1960) presented by The Film Foundation; a 4K restoration of A Touch of Zen (King Hu, 1973) presented by the Taiwan Film Institute, a 4K restoration of The Third Man (Reed, 1949) presented by StudioCanal, and a new 2K restoration (sourced from a 4K film scan) of Z (Costa-Gavras, 1968) presented by KG Productions with the support of the French Centre National du Cinéma et de l'Image Animée (CNC).
Son of Saul
Last year represented the first time in history that no 35mm prints were screened as part of the Cannes Classics program, though the festival's organizers have hinted that something in this year's line-up will be presented on film. And the festival will be busting out the film projectors for screenings of at least one film in competition—Son of Saul, directed by László Nemes, a former A.D. to the famed Hungarian auteur Bela Tarr, was shot in 35mm at a 1.33:1 aspect ratio, and will be screened that way.
