Cannes One To Watch: ‘Banel & Adama’ Writer-Director Ramata-Toulaye Sy On Representing Her Heritage In Debut Film

Breaking news for anyone blown away by Celine Song’s “Past Lives” or hoping to nail her down for her second project. She’s already written a script and A24, which produced the Sundance and Berlin Film Festival breakout, is going to make it.

Rob Savage isn’t a household name in horror, yet, but if you look at his most recent work, this is a guy who seems like he is destined for great things in genre filmmaking. And in this episode of The Playlist Podcast, I got the chance to talk to Savage and discuss his newest film, “The Boogeyman,” which is based on a short story by Stephen King.

As she takes on the role of a criminal’s mom in Apple TV+’s new series “The Crowded Room”, Emmy Rossum is reflecting on another crime story: “Mystic River”.

Netflix has removed a bunch of films from the platform today (June 1) – check out the full list below.The streaming giant removes films and TV shows every month from the service, with most of the cuts typically made at the start of the month across the UK and US.In June, major removals include multiple Jackass movies, Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction, Paddington 2 and Wes Craven’s original Scream from 1996.

Priyanka Chopra Jonas has always known her worth in the entertainment industry!In a recent interview with, the 40-year-old actress recounted a moment early in her career — around 2002/2003 — where she walked away from a project due to an inappropriate request from a director. «I'm undercover, I'm seducing the guy — obviously that’s what girls do when they’re undercover. But I'm seducing the guy and you have to take off one piece of clothing [at a time]. I wanted to layer up.

Priyanka Chopra Jonas is opening up about a “dehumanizing moment” early on in her Bollywood career where a director asked to see her underwear on set.

Priyanka Chopra is reflecting upon her time as an actress, detailing a moment where she felt her boundaries were crossed. An India native, Chopra's career accelerated after she won the Miss World 2000 pageant. She began starring in Bollywood films, and was hired to work with a director she was unfamiliar with.

Italian filmmaker Nanni Moretti made it clear why he was making fun of Netflix in his latest Cannes film entry, A Brighter Tomorrow.

Julio Torres stars and directs “Problemista,” his debut film. The film has released its first trailer, depicting a surreal yet grounded take on an immigration story, with the many wrinkles and charms that are expected from a Torres-led project. What to watch: 7 movies and shows to stream this week - May 19Arnold Schwarzenegger drives a tank to Netflix HQ in new ad‘Los Espookys’ creators discuss the show’s unique Latin American perspectiveA post shared by Julio Torres~* (@spaceprincejulio)“Problemista” tells the story of Alejandro (Torres), a toy maker from El Salvador whose visa is running out.

“When was the last truly f*cking nasty, nasty, bad pop girl?” This is the question posed in the teaser trailer to HBO’s The Idol, which promises the kind of lurid, adrenaline-pumping pop-culture exposé you’d see if Paul Verhoeven was ever allowed to make a film like Showgirls again. Said trailer also features copious quantities of cocaine, champagne and seriously dirty dancing, suggesting a warts-and-all drama about a super-ambitious Madonna/Lady Gaga type who has recently hit the big time in the dog-eat-dog world of showbiz.

EXCLUSIVE: Wagner Moura (Narcos, Elite Squad, The Gray Man) is set to star in the upcoming biopic Angicos about Brazilian educator and author Paulo Freire. Felipe Hirsch will write and direct and Adriana Tavares of Café Royal will produce alongside Paula Linhares of Cenya Productions and Marcos Tellechea and Guilherme Somlo of Reagent Media.

Elsa Keslassy International Correspondent Kaouther Ben Hania, the Oscar-nominated director of “The Man Who Sold His Skin” whose latest film “Four Daughters” is competing at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, will next direct “Mimesis,” an epic love story set in Tunisia. While the plot is under wraps, the story is set in two different periods, the 1990s and the 1940s, paying tribute to cinema and Arab-Muslim cultural heritage. It’s being produced by Nadim Cheikhrouha at Tanit Films, who produced Ben Hania’s “Four Daughters” and her previous film “The Man Who Sold His Skin” which world premiered at Venice where it won best actor for Yahya Mahayni and was nominated for best international film at the Oscars in 2021.

Leo Barraclough International Features Editor Flawless, XYZ Films and Tea Shop Productions have acquired the Cannes Critics’ Week selection “Vincent Must Die” for all English-speaking territories from Goodfellas. Flawless, the pioneering film technology company and a leader in the field of visual translation, recently announced it has launched a partnership with XYZ Films and Tea Shop Productions to acquire rights to foreign-language films, converting them to English for distribution in relevant markets. Directed by Stéphan Castang, “Vincent Must Die” is written by Mathieu Naert, produced by Thierry Lounas and Claire Bonnefoy, and stars Karim Leklou and Vimala Pons. In the film, an ordinary man finds himself fighting for his life after he goes out one day and is mysteriously attacked by random strangers in the street with the intent to kill him.

“You cannot go against your destiny,” 18-year-old Banel is warned in Banel & Adama (Banel e Adama), a visually striking and deceptively heavy debut from French-Senegalese director Ramata-Toulaye Sy, only the second Black woman to make it into the Cannes Competition since Mati Diop’s Atlantics in 2019. At first sight, Sy’s film seems a bit of an outlier in a lineup sprinkled with veterans, and the extra scrutiny that comes with a Competition slot may well work against it. But it’s entirely possible that it might strike a chord with the jury, notably Rungano Nyoni, whose debut I Am Not a Witch took a similarly subversive and sophisticated approach to themes of African tradition and folklore.

Jessica Kiang The interlinked names of the lovers have an unusual power in Ramata-Toulaye Sy’s haunting, halting  “Banel & Adama.” They play over and over as a whispery lullaby on the soundtrack. They cover the sheets of paper on which Banel (Khady Mane) compulsively writes their names, like a schoolgirl practicing cursive on the name of her crush. There’s an innocence to it at the beginning, as though Banel, whose strange mind we mostly occupy, is simply delighting in the sound and shape of their togetherness. But that’s when “Banel & Adama” is a love story, and before it descends, a little too hesitantly but with a subtly seductive power nonetheless, into drought and madness and maybe, cosmic retribution. The sun-and-superstition-soaked tale of an African girl contending with fate and folk tradition has some precedent in Rungano Nyoni’s excellent “I Am Not a Witch.” But here, as the bright imagery begins to hint paradoxically at creeping darkness, we can no longer be sure that witchcraft is not exactly what is at work. 

Christopher Vourlias Debutante director Ramata-Toulaye Sy will join one of world cinema’s most select clubs when she climbs the stairs of the Grand Theatre Lumière on May 20 for the premiere of “Banel & Adama,” which unspools in the main competition at the Cannes Film Festival. It marks just the second time in the French fest’s 76-year history that a Black woman will compete for the Palme d’Or, a glass ceiling that was shattered only four years ago by Sy’s French Senegalese compatriot, Mati Diop (“Atlantics”). While acknowledging the honor, it is a club, Sy admits, about which she has some ambivalence. “I really hope that soon all this will be taken for granted — that we won’t be counting the Black directors, that we won’t be counting women,” the helmer tells Variety. “It means that there’s still something wrong, that there’s still something that hasn’t become completely normal and natural.”

In an early scene of French director Stéphan Castang’s Cannes Critics’ Week entry Vincent Must Die, a colleague of the film’s titular protagonist whacks him around the head with his laptop. A little later, another workmate stabs him in the arm. “He’s just an average guy who wakes up one morning to discover that everyone wants to kill him,” Castang explains. The debut feature follows in the wake of Julia Ducournau’s Raw and Just Philippot’s The Swarm as French genre titles to be championed by the first and second film-focused Critics’ Week.

They say you always remember the first time, but Molly Manning Walker’s Cannes debut, in the shorts section of Directors’ Fortnight, only happened in theory, after the pandemic closed down the festival. “It’s weird but I’ve never seen a film I’ve made in a cinema,” she says. “Both of my other shorts came out in the pandemic, then Good Thanks, You? premiered at Cannes, but only virtually, which was heartbreaking. So, it will be great to be at Cannes and experience it in full force.”

You know an artist must be doing something special when even Andrew Bujalski, the godfather of mumblecore, calls their work “excruciating and extraordinary.” But this is where Brooklyn-based director and comic-book writer Joanna Arnow is right now, after a string of darkly funny shorts that might be said to combine the sexual candor of early Chantal Akerman with the sardonic humor of Todd Solondz.

Refresh for updates…Sean Penn, asked about the current state of big wig studio chiefs and the plight of writers and directors, said today at the Black Flies presser, “The industry has been uspending the writers and directors for a long time. I fully support the situation with writers guild, of course.”