Since 2014, the Critics’ Week at the Cannes Film Festival has accompanied its talents on their journey as they make the transition from shorts to feature films, via its Next Step programme. Since 2019, the workshop offered every year to the selected participants (see the news on the latest intake) has been enriched by a competition designed to single just one of them out. This year, it was the project Liar Man by Greece’s Manolis Mavris, staged by US outfit 2AM and the UK’s Venus Productions, which was crowned as the winner by a jury comprising Marion Delord (Hildegarde), Thania Dimitrakopoulou (The Match Factory), Martin Jérôme (Condor) and Olimpia Pont Cháfer (TorinoFilmLab, Seville Film Festival).

Manolis Mavris’s short films, which explore the concept of heterotopia, and the boundaries between the real and the imaginary, have been presented at many major international festivals. Worth singling out in particular is Brutalia, Days of Labour, which won an award in 2021 in the Cannes Critics’ Week, where the filmmaker returns this year with Midnight Skin, which is showing as a Special Screening.

The story of his project Liar Man unfolds in the 1970s, at a holiday resort on a private island for rich tourists; clients bask in the sunshine as the employees toil away. One of these employees – K, the concierge – meets an analyst who could well unearth a lie, buried deep in K’s subconscious, and could potentially threaten his mental health and the balance of the island itself. Indeed, this facility is nothing but a reflection of K’s mind, with its architecture, its hemispheres, dark corners and tempestuous psyche.

It’s also worth noting that the Next Step programme is being bolstered by a second annual workshop that will take place on Corsica over the course of one week in early autumn. The objective of Next Step Volume 2, which is open to filmmakers who have taken part in the Critics’ Week and are working on their first or second feature-length project, is to help them meet composers, by hooking them up at the key moment of the screenplay re-write. The workshop will be organised with the support of Sacem, in partnership with the agri-cultural project and studio space Providenza.