Cannes 2023: The return of Catherine Corsini finally joins the official competition

Thierry Frémaux had warned, during the press conference of April 13, that the official selection could undergo modifications. He thus announced, on Monday, the addition of two new films in official competition, bringing to twenty-one the number of feature films competing in the queen category. It is, first, the Return of Catherine Corsini. The film was initially to appear in the list unveiled in mid-April, as revealed by Le Parisien and Télérama. He had been temporarily removed.

At issue: suspicions of harassment and an irregularity concerning a scene involving an underage actress. The feature film was the subject of a rare measure by the National Cinema Center. The latter deprived him of financial aid because a scene involving a minor was not declared to a commission responsible for studying requests for filming with children. An error of an administrative nature, according to the production of the Return. "The board of directors of the Festival wanted to know more about the situation of the work," the event told Le Parisien in mid-April, which therefore chose to include it in its list of films in competition.

The return, shot in Corsica, follows a woman working for a Parisian family vacationing on the Isle of Beauty. With this addition, seven women will run for the Palme d'Or this year, an unprecedented number. They were five in the running in 2022. Catherine Corsini, 66, has already been in competition on the Croisette in 2021 with La Fracture, which featured a couple of women (Marina Foïs and Valéria Bruni-Tedeschi) stuck in the hospital an evening of demonstrations of "yellow vests".

Another addition in official competition, the film Black Flies by Frenchman Jean-Stéphane Sauvaire. This thriller adapted from the novel 911 by Shannon Burke tells the adventures of two doctors in New York. The 54-year-old filmmaker was last present at the Cannes Film Festival in 2017, out of competition, with A Prayer Before Dawn. The story of a Briton who finds himself in a Thai prison and falls in love with boxing.

A total of fourteen films joined the official selection on Monday. Among them, Abbé Pierre, a life of struggles with Benjamin Lavernhe out of competition and, in the Cannes Première category, Love and Forests by French director Valérie Donzelli, Eureka by Lisandro Alonso with Viggo Mortensen and Chiara Mastroianni, Perdidos en la noche by the Mexican Amat Escalante. This one had won the prize for directing in 2013 with Heli.