After the unveiling of the programme of the 57th Directors’ Fortnight (unspooling from 15-25 May as part of the 78th Cannes Film Festival - read the article), Cineuropa met up with Julien Rejl, the section’s General Delegate, in Paris.

Cineuropa: Why did you tighten the selection to 18 feature films, compared to 21 last year?
Julien Rejl: I noticed last year that by trying to add a few more films, simply to give a chance to more filmmakers, we had been constrained in our planning, since we only have one screening venue, to screen some films only once. It’s always strange when certain films have more exposure than others. So we wanted to return to a more egalitarian approach. Having fewer titles allows the Fortnight to better work on them, better expose and accompany them.

What hasn’t changed is your editorial line, which is strongly focused on discovery, with eight feature debuts in the programme.
Is it a conscious choice? I don’t know. What’s for sure, is that we all feel, within the selection committee, this desire to clear the way, to go towards the unexpected, towards surprises, in places other than where some might expect us to go. Even if there are indeed many debut films and filmmakers that are still little known, I also think that in terms of typologies of films and proposals, we tried to go towards things we hadn’t yet approached.

What diversity can we therefore expect from your selection, which includes amongst others two horror films?
There was first this general idea to bring back some genre cinema, in a much more assertive way than I had done the two previous years. For he had looked, but we hadn’t been able to find any. Here, with Dangerous Animals by Sean Byrne, there is genre cinema for amateurs, but not only, with the idea of “entertainment”, of fun, that is of course linked to the question of mise en scène, for this is an excellent director who respects the codes of the subgenre of shark movies and survival films. I think the Fortnight must also be in this niche. And indeed, there is also some horror with Her Will Be Done by Julia Kowalski [article], in a more mysterious, more auteur style. But there is also some very popular comedy such as The Party’s Over! by Antony Cordier [article] as well as a very confident thriller with Girl on Edge by Jinghao Zhou (a Chinese debut feature about figure skating). There are some films that decide to get on the rails of certain genres and to claim them in order to offer something new.

Together with these discoveries, you are presenting new films by Christian Petzold and Robin Campillo. Have you softened the intention you presented when you arrived at the Fortnight, of not selecting films rejected from the Official Selection?
No. There has never been any downgrading. What I had said when I arrived was that it seems important to me that the Fortnight has its own colours, that it positions itself on films that perhaps couldn’t play elsewhere due to their nature. The idea is to not wait for films to be rejected from elsewhere to get them. Christian Petzold isn’t at all a Cannes regular. He’s an auteur I love and I found it very interesting to make it so that the Fortnight would really showcase him in Cannes for the first time. As for Robin Campillo, it is a slightly peculiar film since it is also Laurent Cantet’s last [article], a completely unique project and I believed, as an auteur cinema gesture, that its place was as the opening film of the Fortnight. I find that absolutely coherent with this idea that the Fortnight is a land of clearing and exploration, but also a selection that reconnects with director friends, filmmakers who already have a certain track record and who are returning with works on which there may not be competitive stakes, yet which are great works nonetheless.

In geographical terms, the 2025 selection, as the previous two editions, encapsulates mostly a French block, some independent North American cinema, and some Asian films.
We really search all over the world. This year, there were for instance some South American films that we really loved: some have gone elsewhere and some others, when it comes to make definitive choices, it’s the quality of the films that matters and we eventually preferred to take an additional Asian film that’s very strong. I reserve the right for the entire world not to be represented in one year and of course, even if I don’t ascribe myself any duty, I do tell myself that next year, we will redouble our efforts so that those who were not represented much may be more so. But first of all, we try to stay faithful to our first criterion: to go, in our search, towards things that really surprise us, that are new and bold.

Is the situation the same with regards to European cinemas, beyond the French films, the Belgian one and the Ukrainian documentary you selected?
It is no regret of ours, but we really would have like for there to be some Nordic filmmakers this years, for we received several films from that region that stood out for their truly fresh and renewed desire for cinema. It’s a shame because we didn’t find the film or films we would have liked to include in our final selection, but the dynamism is there. The same goes for Latin countries, Portugal, Italy, Spain, with films that were testament to a cinema in really good shape. But arbitration made us prefer to discover other filmmakers. Finally, it is true that France, and this is a bit of a habit in Cannes and in the Fortnight, is always represented quite well. But even if Thomas Ngijol is French, Indomptables is in itself a film that talks about Cameroon in a fictional manner, a real crime film with cinematic ambition, a remarkable talent for mise-en-scène and direction of actors. In its DNA, it is a Cameroonian film. And when we discovered it, that was a total surprise!

A very persistent rumour before the unveiling of your selection predicted the presence of Jim Jarmusch at the Fortnight, or even a fight for the film amongst selectors. Was there any truth to that?
All I can say is that I received several congratulatory emails on Monday for the presence of Jim Jarmusch’s film in the Fortnight. I thought perhaps something I wasn’t aware of had been validated while I was away and I was very glad. Honestly, I haven’t seen Jim’s film and I’m looking forward to it, and of course I wish him the best for his world premiere.

You are bringing back the Audience Award, which was launched in 2024. What is its impact?
It’s a little early to say after just one year. But I am super happy to see the fate of its first winner, Universal Language by Matthew Rankin, since its presentation in the Fortnight. Of course, this is first of all to do with the film and we won’t pat ourselves on the back. Still, I do have the feeling that getting recognised by the audience did help the film shine. The fact that this is the film that Canada chose for the Oscars was not a given, because even though the film is wonderful, it is also completely mad, surreal, and bizarre. I took this Oscars selection as a positive sign, so we are giving it another try this year. We will see what happens and we are not putting any pressure on ourselves for whatever comes next.

You’d set the bar quite high when you arrived at the Fortnight in terms of standards and “radicalness” in your editorial line. With three years of experience behind you now, what are your relationships like with sales agents, distributors and producers who were a little surprised at first?
The Fortnight is an opening to a plurality of cinemas, not only in terms of origins and nationalities, but also in terms of typologies, genres, cutting-edge auteur cinema as well as more popular propositions. This is what makes cinema so rich, and what has always made the Fortnight so rich: to be able to present all these films on an equal footing and to see that they can co-exist. That has always been my philosophy. Then, the fact is that since we like to go looking for auteurs, to discover them, this can have been a little surprising because, given that we only have 18 or 19 spots, it is difficult for us to please everyone. The goal isn’t that, but instead to find filmmakers and give them a platform that will help them be born in the eyes of the whole world. It’s a rather heavy, rather big responsibility, at least it means a lot to me, and I have to work with that. It may have been surprising at first and some people started looking at box office numbers for the films. But I checked: when the first films by the Dardenne brothers, by Michael Haneke, by Ruben Östlund and many others who went through the Fortnight were released at the time, they were not always big hits in cinemas. The first films of these filmmakers who now have Palme d’Ors needed time to be discovered and considered to be the world of great auteurs. So I think we need to remain humble regarding all this, all while also recognising that we are very happy when we have films that are immediately met by the public, that are going to be popular. Because I really believe in popular cinephilia, I grew up with it. So I try to stay very open to everything. But it must be known that only 30 to 40% of the films that are sent to us already have a sales agent or a distributor, so that means that there are 60 to 70% of films that come from nowhere, all naked. I think everyone must be considered in the same way and I try to work in harmony and with everybody. We hear this argument of cinema admissions more and more, but I think this selection can contradict it because we absolutely have not compromised on quality, and the generosity in almost all the films we are going to present makes me hopeful that this will convert into cinema admissions, even if that isn’t my primary goal.