After twenty years in the making, Terry Gilliam’s ill-starred The Man Who Killed Don Quixote will finally receive its world premiere at next month’s Cannes Film Festival.
In the traditional announcement of films to top-up the official selection, revealed last week, the organisers said Gilliam’s film would screen, out of competition, at the Closing Night ceremony.
The British-based director – and former Monty Python member – began working on the The Man Who Killed Don Quixote in 1998 but the production was struck by a catalogue of disasters, from the flooding of sets and the ill-health of cast members to arguments with the insurance company. Two years later, a film was released – Lost in La Mancha, about his failure to complete the film. After resolving the legal disputes, with a new cast of Jonathan Pryce, Adam Driver and Olga Kurylenko, Gilliam will finally share his latest fantasy adventure on a grand scale at the Lumiere Theatre on 19th May.
Another notable addition to the line-up, also out of competition, is the Danish director Lars von Trier, who was banned from Cannes in 2011 after saying that he sympathised with Hitler, while promoting Melancholia. A Palme d’Or winner in 2000 for Dancer in the Dark, he’ll be screening The House that Jack Built, with Matt Dillon and Uma Thurman, out of competition.
The organisers have also added a further three films to the Official Competition. The former Palme d’Or winner Nuri Bilge Ceylan, from Turkey, returns with The Wild Pear Tree. Bringing the number of films contesting the prizes to 21, French director Yann Gonzalez will be screening A Knife in the Heart and Sergey Dvortsevoy, from Russia is in competition with Ayka; neither director has been up for the Palme d’Or before, although Dvortsevoy won the top prize in the Un Certain Regard side-bar in 2008, with Tulpan.
Two midnight screenings have been added to the programme; the Scottish director Kevin Macdonald returns to documentary with his film about Whitney Houston and Ramin Bahrani, who’s followed up 99 Homes, with an adaptation of Ray Bradbury’s novel Fahrenheit 451, also starring Michael Shannon.
Completing the line-up, the organisers thanked all the film-makers, distributors and sellers who’d suggested films and revealed that they’d viewed more than 1900 films, across the various selection committees.