From beachside summits to yacht parties, leading figures at Cannes debated whether AI was cinema's next creative revolution or an existential threat. From beachside summits to yacht parties, leading figures at Cannes debated whether AI was cinema's next creative revolution or an existential threat. Darren Aronofsky among proponents of using technology, while Guillermo del Toro says he would'rather die' U nder a white marquee on Cannes' Croisette beach, with the Mediterranean glistening behind him and superyachts drifting across the horizon, the director Darren Aronofsky addressed an audience of executives and tech evangelists gathered for an "AI for Talent" summit. "There's so much pushback against AI," said Aronofsky, who has faced criticism over his embrace of generative AI projects though his new studio, Primordial Soup, at a time when artificial intelligence has become one of the film industry's most divisive fault lines. Darren Aronofsky: 'AI is not impersonating a person, it's actually a tool.' "AI is a terrible word, because it's a catchphrase for so many different things," continued the director of Requiem for a Dream, The Wrestler, and Black Swan.

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In its first week, the seventy-ninth edition of the festival unveiled standout new works by James Gray, Paweł Pawlikowski, and Ryûsuke Hamaguchi. Attend the Cannes Film Festival long enough, and you will grow wearily accustomed to the reality that some of the best films to première there are routinely overlooked for prizes. Lee Chang-dong magnificently unsettling psychological chiller, "Burning," failed to ignite the excitement of the 2018 jury. The tragicomic glories of Maren Ade's " Toni Erdmann," from 2016, were just as inexplicably unrewarded. Jurors shut out David Cronenberg's "A History of Violence," in 2005; Hou Hsiao-hsien's "Flowers of Shanghai," in 1998; Krzysztof Kieślowski's "Three Colors: Red," in 1994; Martin Scorsese's "Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore," in 1975; and--the tradition goes way back--Vittorio De Sica's "Umberto D.," in 1952.

Kleber Mendonça Filho wants his films to reclaim lost history. For Kleber Mendonça Filho, filmmaking is an act of both provocation and preservation. Mendonça was born in 1968, in the early years of a ruthless military dictatorship--a time when cinema, like much else, was harshly constrained. His mother, Joselice Jucá, was a historian who studied Brazil's abolitionist movement, and she taught him that filling gaps in the cultural memory was a way to expose concealed truths. His relationship with film is inextricably linked with his home town, Recife--a port city where attractive beaches and high-rise developments coexist with sprawling favelas and rampant crime. In his youth, Mendonça was fascinated by the city's grand cinema palaces. He carried a Super 8 camera to the tops of marquees and shot dizzying images; he spent hours in projection booths, learning the mechanics of how films reached the screen. Over time, Mendonça watched those theatres fall into decline, an experience that he likened to being aboard a ship as it wrecked. But even as Recife lost its allure, he made the city a fixture of his films--a way of vindicating its place in history. His first narrative feature, "Neighboring Sounds," takes place on a street where he lived as a child, a setting that he spent years documenting. Later, he made "Pictures of Ghosts," a documentary about Recife told largely through its cinemas.

The Cannes film festival isn't typically associated with video games, but this year it's playing host to an unusual collaboration. Lili is a co-production between the New York-based game studio iNK Stories (creator of 1979 Revolution: Black Friday, about a photojournalist in Iran) and the Royal Shakespeare Company, and it's been turning heads with its eye-catching translocation of Macbeth to modern-day Iran. "It's been such an incredible coup to have it as the first video game experience at Cannes," says iNK Stories co-founder Vassiliki Khonsari. "People have gone in saying, I'm not familiar playing games, so I may just try it out for five minutes. The Cannes festival's Immersive Competition began in 2024, although the lineup doesn't usually feature traditional video games. "VR films and projection mapping is the thrust of it," says iNK Stories' other co-founder, Vassiliki's husband Navid Khonsari. But Lili weaves live-action footage with video game mechanics in a similar way to a game such as Telling Lies or Immortality. Its lead, Zar Amir Ebrahimi, won best actress at Cannes three years ago. Lili focuses on the story of Lady Macbeth, here cast as the ambitious wife of an upwardly mobile officer in the Basij (a paramilitary volunteer militia within the Islamic Revolutionary Guard in Iran). As in the play, she plots a murder to secure her husband's rise. "I think that the narrative of Lady Macbeth is that she's manipulative, and that's exactly what got us interested," says Navid. "The social limitations based on her gender forced her to try to attain whatever leadership role she can," he continues. "If she was a man, she would have been one of the greatest kings that country would have ever experienced, but because she was a woman she had to work within the structure that was there for her.

Although the Cannes Film Festival is the world's most prestigious movie showcase, its spotlight rarely falls on nonfiction film. Years go by without a single documentary competing for its biggest honor, the Palme d'Or, and there is no separate documentary prize. Juliette Binoche, the president of this year's jury, devoted part of her opening-night remarks to Fatma Hassona, the Palestinian photojournalist who was killed in an Israeli airstrike the day after it was announced that her documentary Put Your Soul on Your Hand and Walk would be premiering at Cannes. But the film itself was slotted into a low-profile sidebar devoted to independent productions. The festival did, however, roll out the red carpet for The Six Billion Dollar Man, Eugene Jarecki's portrait of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, which premiered out of competition on Wednesday evening.

But Cannes has now been taken up a notch, with BMW debuting its luxurious new yacht at the 76th annual film festival. The new'Icon' boat took the French coast by storm today as it showcased a lavish yet emission-free form of travel. Beyond its slick glass exterior lies 360 rotating seats, a voice-controlled touchscreen and numerous other high-tech features fit for royalty. Even its sound system screams movie star glamour with an exclusive soundtrack by the Hollywood composer Hans Zimmer stowed inside. BMW debuted its zero-emission'Icon' yacht at the glamorous 76th Cannes Film Festival Amid its debut, the German car firm stressed that its prism-shaped boat'encapsulates a future-facing form of luxury', with designers across Los Angeles, Munich and Shanghai having worked on it.

The UK-assembled rover that will be sent to Mars in 2020 will bear the name of DNA pioneer Rosalind Franklin. The honour follows a public call for suggestions that drew nearly 36,000 responses from right across Europe. Astronaut Tim Peake unveiled the name at the Airbus factory in Stevenage where the robot is being put together. The six-wheeled vehicle will be equipped with instruments and a drill to search for evidence of past or present life on the Red Planet. Giving the rover a name associated with a molecule fundamental to biology seems therefore to be wholly appropriate.

Who could turn down an invitation to an event that promised "a candid look at advertising in 2018" and undertook "to unpack the most talked about challenges and opportunities" in the field today"? It is, of course, a sign of my age that I was surprised that the invitation came from a Kantar Millward Brown. To have a research supplier reporting back on the Cannes Lions 2018, once the stronghold of creative agencies, is probably surprising only to someone who still has memories of struggling to stay awake while being subjected to hours of earnest monotone presentations of reams of statistics by market researchers. Of course, things have evolved, and Kantar Millward Brown now describes itself as "the world's leading experts in helping clients grow great brands". The website assures us that "we are constantly analysing, understanding and interpreting the world around us.

Society is on the brink of the second industrial revolution according to Wired co-founder Kevin Kelly who says the formula for tomorrow's startups is simple; add artificial intelligence (AI). Kelly was speaking as part of a keynote at the Cannes Lions on the "inevitable" 12 technological forces that will shape the world. One of the key changes that Kelly sees on the horizon is AI, which he says is "launching the second industrial revolution". The first revolution, he says, came about because of the invention of "artificial power" which could be added to manual processes to make them easier. Using an example of a water pump moving from a manual process to an electric pump, Kelly says the formula for the industrial revolution was "take X, add electricity, and you have something new that can do something we couldn't imagine before".