13/10/2017 - 180 films are being showcased and a multitude of prestigious guests have been invited to the event, including Wong Kar-wai, Tilda Swinton, Guillermo del Toro, Michael Mann, Alfonso Cuarón and NWR

Director Wong Kar-wai, who will receive the 2017 Lumière Award

Over the course of the last decade, the Lumière Festival, organised by Thierry Frémaux, has become an unmissable rendezvous for enthusiasts of world cinema history. But it has also proven to be an extremely popular event in Lyon, and it will certainly not stray from its high-end editorial policy for its tenth edition, set to unspool from 14-22 October. Indeed, the 180 heritage films on the line-up will be accompanied, introduced and discussed by international and French stars of the seventh art, spearheaded by Wong Kar-wai, who will receive the 2017 Lumière Award, will have a retrospective dedicated to him, will lead a master class and has also rustled up a menu of ten show-stopping Chinese films from the 2000s.

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Also featuring on the master-class schedule are the UK’s Tilda Swinton, Mexican maestro Guillermo del Toro, his US counterparts Michael Mann and William Friedkin, and France’s Diane Kurys, Anna Karina, Jean-François Stévenin and Eddy Mitchell. The group of high-profile guests also includes Mexican director Alfonso Cuarón (who will be in attendance to present The Secret Formula by Rubén Gámez), Denmark’s Nicolas Winding Refn (who will unveil the exclusive premiere of a digital project that has been kept top-secret until now) and the UK’s Hugh Hudson.

Around 100 other personalities will be in town to present the films on the programme, including filmmakers Bertrand Tavernier, Luc Dardenne, Robert Guédiguian, Claude Lelouch, Christian Carion, Jean-Paul Salomé, Tonie Marshall, Nicolas Philibert, Laurent Tirard, Jean-Paul Rappeneau, Anne Le Ny, Danièle Thompson, Eric Lartigau and Philippe Le Guay, composer Alexandre Desplat, actresses Catherine Frot, Marina Foïs, Ludivine Sagnier and Lolita Chammah, actress-producer Julie Gayet, actors Sami Bouajila and Pierre Deladonchamps, DoP Caroline Champetier, plus Frédérique Bredin (head of the CNC), Gian Luca Farinelli (director of the Bologna Film Archive) and Alberto Barbera (head of the Venice Film Festival).

Other events of note include retrospectives entitled “Clouzot Mystery”, “Classic Westerns” and “Permanent History of Female Filmmakers”, a focus on Giorgio Moroder’s film soundtracks, a celebration of the centenary of Jean-Pierre Melville’s birth, and the premiere of an eight-episode series by Bertrand Tavernier centring on French cinema. And that’s not to mention the rich programmes of the festival’s various sections: “Great Screenings” (including the director’s cut of Close Encounters of the Third Kind by Steven Spielberg, 1900 by Bernardo Bertolucci and Reds by Warren Beatty), a selection of this year’s major film restorations (including titles by Woody Allen, Claude Autant-Lara, André Cayatte, Patrice Chéreau, Jacques Rivette and so on), preview screenings of the autumn’s theatrical releases (comprising movies helmed by Vittorio De Sica, Mauro Bolognini, John Cassavetes, Tony Richardson, Aleksandar Petrovic and so on), “Sublime Moments of Silent Film” (two Harold Lloyd evenings complete with live film concerts, a Buster Keaton programme, etc), “Treasures and Curios” (this year including works from Finland, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Bulgaria, Lebanon and Slovakia) and “Documentaries About Cinema”.

Lastly, the fifth edition of the Classic Film Market (17-20 October), the only event of its kind in the world, will offer attendees a plethora of round-tables, one of which homes in on the European landscape (particularly Greece, Hungary and the Baltic states), with Lucia Recalde (Creative Europe MEDIA) among the participants. In addition, the market has invited Jérôme Soulet (Gaumont) as a very special guest; he will make a keynote speech, before distributors go on to reveal their 2018 line-ups.

(Translated from French)