Cannes Directors' Fortnight in Three Films

With his acclaimed second feature, Our Beloved Month of August, Miguel Gomes put his own singular spin on the filmmaking traditions that exemplify Portugal's cinema history, combining an ethnographic style of interacting with seemingly real musical performances with the kind of arch meta-fiction about the comic perils of making a film that has become his hallmark.

Meanwhile in South Chantal Akerman departs drastically from the subject matter that she is known for to make a film in the American South, in this case about a black man, James Byrd, Jr., who was lynched by two white men by being dragged along by a rope from the back of a car. What results is one of the starkest and most moving portraits of the legacy of slavery seen in cinema. A single long shot of a country road seen from the back of a truck becomes an unforgettably poetic Akermanian image that seems to encompass the world.

And in his acclaimed debut feature documentary, Tarnation, co-produced by Gus Van Sant, Jonathan Caouette traverses the line between documentary, narrative fiction, and home movie, to create a film that offers a psychedelic whirlwind of snapshots, Super-8 home movies, answering machine messages, video diaries, early short films, snippets of 1980s American popular culture, and dramatic reenactments that form an authentic, multi-dimensional portrait of a complicated American family.